Netbooks - what's the fuss?

I can't quite get into the hysteria that other teachers and ICT consultants are getting into at the moment with regards to using netbooks. You see I hear other teachers raving about their use in the classes, but to be honest I don't get it.

At my school we received one from the tesco computers for school vouchers scheme, and when it arrived I took it aside to see what we could do. Well, pretty quickly two major flaws became apparent;

• We cannnot log into the school network. Our technician explained that as we run an Active Directory network (running on windows) and the netbook is a linux machine they are incompatible. So, no access for pupils to their files and folders.

• The screen displays at a width of 800 pixels. Our website is optimized (along with most other sites nowadays) for 1024 pixels. Therefore, sideways scrolling becomes neccessary to view websites (and everyone knows how appealing sideways scrolling is)

I cannot see a use for this machine in school, with these problems. The only use it may have is as a portable field trip electronic diary, and when used with a mobile broadband dongle it could access the admin side of our website to post live articles from a field trip location.

Would I go and buy 100+ of these things - as I heard some teachers at this years BETT show? No. I'll stick to laptops in the classroom with a full display, and access to our AD server.