ASUS T9 Notebook

There is no question that the current trend in electronics is towards mobility. As components shrink and prices fall, the logical transition is to smaller and easier to handle PDA's, MP3 players, and even computers. Long gone are the days where buying a notebook meant a sacrifice in performance or an unmanageable weight; now at days desktop replacements can be found at more than reasonable speeds, with reasonable weights, and even reasonable prices. Notebook sales have been soaring in the past two years.

The notebook market has progressed much the same way that the desktop did years ago, just at an accelerated rate. The past year has seen the introduction of major competition in both the notebook CPU and the notebook video market , with AMD continuing in full force with their Mobile Athlon 4 and Mobile Duron chips and NVIDIA stepping into the video chip arena with their GeForce2 and GeForce4 Go graphics processors. The accelerated competition has certainly catalyzed the growth of the notebook industry. Couple the increased competition with the introduction of high speed wireless options such as 802.11b and BlueTooth and it is really no surprise that notebook sales rose almost 50% in 2000, a trend which has continued.

With notebooks selling so well and becoming many people's primary computers, deciding what notebook to buy is increasingly important. Buyers are now faced with choosing not only a brand, but also a CPU speed, a video processor, memory amounts, and more; decisions much like those buying desktop computers face. The difference here is that in the notebook's case replacing unwanted or sub par components is not easy, or even possible in many instances. When making a large, fairly permanent investment, it is only naturally to be overcautious. This is where AnandTech can help.

Today we kick off a new section of AnandTech: our notebook review section. We understand that many of you are turning to notebook solutions thanks to their fast speed and ease of transfer. We also understand that deciding what notebook to buy is a more than daunting task: much harder than choosing what video card, motherboard, or CPU to purchase. We hope to make things easier for you in the coming months and years by passing a variety of notebooks through the exhaustive AnandTech tests that has gotten us to where we are today.

The first notebook to pass through is the ASUS T9 powered by a 900MHz mobile Pentium III processor. Before we get to the actual notebook review, let's see how notebook reviews should, and are now going to be, done.