Wading through the numerous netbooks available today can be challenging, so you might want to at least start with this list of the first three netbooks to consider. There are selected because they have all been fairly well received and, more importantly, all have some feature that distinguishes them from the crowd. As a disclaimer, I have not touched any of these, except for the the HP MiniNote.

Asus Eee PC - This one is obvious. The Eee PC is really the original netbook. It is really targeted at casual web surfing and those sorts of things. There are a number of netbooks in this category, but this one stands out as the original and still one of the best.

HP MiniNote – The MiniNote takes the whole netbook thing a different direction. The high resolution screen (which looks great), the standard hard drive, the large keyboard, and the plentiful RAM available makes this almost more of a very small laptop than a netbook.

Dell’s Inspiron Mini - Unlike the other two, what sets the Inspiron Mini apart from the others is the software. Forget some tiny version of the standard interface or the locked-down icon view, this thing has Ubuntu Netbook Remix.