smartphone or a netbook?

If you're wanting to do wordprocessing, I'd suggest a netbook.

 

Netbook for school...

 

surfing can be done on a smartphone without problems , even youtube watching works , i even can watch online tv on my smartphone , writing/sending emails , spreadsheets and word works too (cost a couple quid as the apps for that are not free ), so if thats all you need a cheap android phone will do like the HTC wildfire (without the S) , the one i have , no need for a netbook any more and less then a quarter of the price of a iPhone

 

A highly portable, light device that is perfect for web browsing and some light word processing? Too bad Apple doesn't make something exactly like you describe.

But, then again, what if they did?

 

You beat me to it. If somebody is deciding between a smart phone and a netbook, an iPad is perfect. I find my iPhone 4 screen to be too small to comfortably use except when waiting in line or looking stuff up on the road. When I'm going to a meeting and want to take notes, I take my iPad. If you had to choose one over the other, the question is whether you need data "always on" or not. The 16 GB iPad is modest in price but you need wifi to do anything on the internet. There is also a 16 GB 3G iPad available with optional data plan. In this case you activate when you need it but you are out $15 (for 30 days or 200 meg on Att) each time you do. Another up side to the 3G iPad is it comes with GPS which can be used as a Nav system without using any data (if you buy a nav app that stores data locally). An iPhone, OTOH can get on the net anywhere any time but it comes with mandatory data plan.

 

Well where are you when you want to utilize that object?

In the past, I had a netbook as my main computer, an iPad, and a smartphone (high end Android one).

What I found (being a college student), was that I ended up using the smarphone a lot for casual browsing, music, and taking pictures.

The netbook was used to do pretty much everything, and the iPad was only used for browsing (when i didn't have anything important to do), music, and watching videos.

Now, I have a 2011 MBP (13 inch), and that's it.

I'm just going to get a smartphone seeing that I have an upgrade.

In your situation, you want something portable to do light work on, but you already have two powerful machines.

I think that it would be more beneficial to you to go ahead and get a really good, top tier smartphone now.

You can use the 15 inch (if you can manage) for the lighter work (and obviously for what you're doing now on it) and the smartphone will come in handy when you're at a coffee shop or something and just want to listen to music, send an email or two, browse facebook, or look at photos/videos.

It's great if you want to do those things in small chunks (waiting in line/eating/in the car, etc.)

 

the ipad2 is hardly modestly priced and the 16gb wifi +3G cost £499.00,the iPhone 4 cost at cheapest £510 if you dont want to be trapped in a long term contract
and the OP did not want to spend that sort of money thats why he asked about alternatives , and a good smartphone running android can do what he wants, but if he needs a bigger screen to do those word dokuments and spreadsheets , a netbook is a real alternative to the iPad ,cheaper , more powerful and offers a keyboard and proper starge space included in the price