If you are a normal Linux user, then you'ļl be fine, and modern ARM plus support chips should be less power hungry than Atom and chipset, although Intel has been making progress. I think it is about 9Watts average on Atom with newer chipsets, compared to first Atoms which use older chipsets and are consuming 26Watts. That "new" AMD chip for netbooks is an atrocity (IMHO) using about 45Watts.

If you want to run Windows, then you'll want to pass on ARM netbooks.

PowerTOP on my Atom-using MSI Wind netbook shows a hair under 10 Watts total consumption at idle, and up to 13 Watts used under heavy load. There are probably some tweaks I could do to drop that even more but I think I've hit diminishing returns in that respect. I'm getting about 5 hours of real-life usage on the 6-cell battery.

Incidentally, the backlight on this thing is almost too powerful. I keep it on the lowest setting even on AC power because it's just that bright.

> If you want to run Windows, then you'll want to pass on ARM netbooks

not necessarily. Remember Windows Mobile already runs on ARM so Microsoft already has plenty of experience porting to RISC machines (not to mention DEC alphas way back) I think MS could do it fairly easily if there really wanted to.

Probably mainly the lower power usage, better battery life etc I'd say.