Walk into your nearest discount electrical store and you'll find a dozen netbooks sitting in a row. On closer inspection, there's plenty to distinguish them.

Firstly consider screen size, which also influences the size of the keyboard. Be wary of going below 10 inches unless you've got eagle eyes and tiny fingers. Check the screen resolution as well, as some opt for 1024x576 instead of 1024x600. It doesn't sound like much but you really notice the difference. Those extra 24 pixels mean less vertical scrolling through documents and menus. An LED backlit display offers a bright image whilst extending the battery life, but be wary of netbooks with high gloss displays. Such displays offer vivid pictures, but the trade off is often terrible screen glare. A matte display is better for working outdoors.

Watch out for keyboards with a lot of flex, as a spongy keyboard is horrible to type on. Many netbooks offer solid edge-to-edge keyboards with big keys, making it easy to type quickly. Sometimes the trade-off is that the buttons are alongside the trackpad rather than above it, which can be annoying.

Netbook makers tend to cut corners when it comes to features to keep the price down, so make sure you read the fine print. Look for an Intel Atom N280 processor rather than the N270 or the old Via processors. Microsoft's licensing generally restricts Windows netbooks to 1GB of RAM, so see if it's possible to upgrade the netbook yourself to 2GB. You could also consider buying a Linux netbook with 2GB of RAM and then installing Windows yourself.

If you're after a long battery life, look for the option of a 6-cell battery rather than the standard 3-cell. Check the battery's milliampere per hour (mAh) rating - the higher the better. Also look for a 1.3 megapixel webcam for sharper images than 0.3 megapixel (VGA) webcams. Advanced connectivity options such as Gigabit Ethernet, 802.11n wifi and Bluetooth 2.1+EDR might also come in handy, tomorrow if not today. Take care, as some 802.11n-compatible netbooks will still only connect to 2.4 GHz networks, not 5GHz.

You'll want at least two USB2.0 ports, especially if you'll be using a USB dongle to access mobile broadband. A handful of netbooks now feature a 3G SIM card slot so you can do away with your USB broadband stick. A memory card slot is also handy for quickly copying photos from your camera.

Consider a Solid State Drive if you're looking to shed weight and extend the battery life, but remember you won't get as much storage space as with a traditional hard drive. If you're after one with the lot, a few netbooks even come with a built-in DVD drive.

By Adam Turner