I'm gonna buy one but not sure if I should wait for the Ions that are coming. Who has one and what is it like?

Important features for me are:

Battery life
Ability to display movies
Good HD space
Nice design

Not asking for much I think, but the Jap hw vendors are... (compared to the yank selling prices that is)

I quite like the Asus eee 1000he cos it has 9.7 hrs battery. The only downer is that the mem is not upgradeable which is becming less common for netbooks.

It's a netbook. You don't need a shitload of memory for them. I've the Asus 1005HA one (I get computer stuff dirt cheap, otherwise I wouldn't have gotten it, a lot of unnecessary stuff in it). It's nice when travelling, but if I'm going to work for longer periods of time I'll probably take the laptop instead; depends a bit. Battery life in the eee is >>>>> laptop. Either way - not being able to upgrade memory is hardly an issue for netbooks.

the 1005HA netbook is quite okay for my needs - 160gb is quite enough, the design is regular ASUS stuff, and since I'm a sucker for them I love it. Battery life is slightly better than the 1000he, but depends (as always) what you use it for. Watching movies on a 10" screen is only acceptable when you're on the road.

You could wait for the Ions to come out, then pick up an older netbook - chances are they'll drop in price once the new stuff arrives?

My boss has one and loves it, I on the other hand would rather cart my laptop around. I don't see the point in getting a netbook when you could get a laptop for a similar price. Only netbook that has any interest for me is the DELL ones with the solid state drives, tiny hard drives but as the only point of a netbook is to browse the web then 16GB is plenty.

Unfortunately the high battery life seashells from Asus are ludicrously expensive over here, so I wont be purchasing one of those.

Will be buying a netbook for on the fly internet access and doc editing. Not interested in games or multimedia editing so performance doesn't have to be shit hot. I'd like a couple of gigs for Win 7.

Notice I never said anything about porn. You will not catch me in a toilet with a netbook spanking the monkey... As much as you may try to catch me, I must tell you that I'm a seasoned ham shank veteran - gloryholeers, spy camera pimps, peeping toms... - I'm number 1 on their most wanted list. I created the against-the-window danger-wank. Patented and everything.

Nobody ever said anything about porn mate.

We knew implicitly