Differences between mobile devices for alternative route choice

[BTRY B 529th FA BN]

First there was the laptop, afaik. Now there are a zillion different versions of portable devices that can easily be made fun of. I'm on an old Dell Inspiron 6000 with a single core 1.73Ghz Intel Pentium M 740 90nm, 5400RPM HDD, 1GB ram... I've ordered a PATA SSD for this but haven't been able to install it, probably will have it installed by the end of the week. I am thinking of Windows 7 64 (have it already) As of late this laptop has been painfully slow. I've had to pull the battery several times because the thing just stopped, like 5 minutes no response type stop. The hope is that the PATA SSD will put some life back into this vacation/backup type of device. Right now I'm per-emptively thinking of an alternative route. I spent 80$ on the PATA SSD for this thing. Haven't opened it yet. If I return it I could put it towards a new laptop, notebook, netbook, notbook, chromebook, domebook, nottop, ultrabook, slimbook, bigbook, littlebook, stupidbook, more F*cking names for devices that essentially do the same thing ..book. So while they essentially do the same thing, I haven't been following the scene since there was a scene, I'm assuming there are little differences that put them in their own niche.

What are the differences?

EDIT: whoops, opened up the back of this laptop and found it had another 512mb of memory totaling 1Gb, yay. Free upgrade!

 

[s44]

I hate to tell you this, but if your old junker runs XP, then you just missed the best use for it. Best Buy was, until last month, offering $100 ($25 gift card, $75 coupon) in exchange for any working XP laptop, no matter how old or crappy.

I absolutely don't think it's worth sinking more money into the clunker. The problem isn't just lack of speed, it's battery: only in the last year or so have we had mobile chips that can handle real tasks and portable chips that can last all day on battery.

Legit options:
(1) Chromebook
+ price, simplicity, full desktop browsing
- screens aren't as good as on tablets
It's a machine that runs Chrome. This can be surprisingly powerful, esp. with offline apps and online office apps/remote desktop, but it's designed for maximally unfussy use.

(2) Tablet (+bluetooth keyboard)
+ screen quality, touch, apps, light weight
- cost, a bit fussy/clunky if you want to set it up for desktop-style use

(3) Convertible tablet (T100, TF701, Surface, Miix 2 10" )
+ somewhat simpler to use as a laptop
- somewhat worse on cost, price, or weight than freestanding tablets

(4) Ultrabook/MBA
+ full laptop, with nice battery
- $$$

For a vacation/second device I'd just get a Chromebook.

 

[BTRY B 529th FA BN]

Thank you for the extensive and fantastic reply! Things are a little more clear. My assumption about the Chromebook is correct in that it uses Google products. I'm in my jump ship stage with Android/Google with my smartphone. I like the strong positive history with what Apple has done but over-all I think I will continue with MS as my main OS choice for my end-user devices for now. MS is behind but being a fairly strong company may be able to rebound and bring a nice mobile platform cohesive with it's desktop OS.

So are those all the main differences between the mobile devices?