One major use of these "companion devices" is to hop online quickly and surf the Web from the comfort of your couch, or on the bus, or anyplace where you're away from your primary PC.

iPad: The iPad's lack of Adobe Flash support is definitely a problem for browsing. For every site that now offers HTML5-based video as an alternative to Flash, there are still scores of sites containing Flash ads, navigation, and applications that will simply break on the iPad. Aside from that, though, the browsing experience on an iPad is pretty great. You don't have tabs in the browser, but you can open several pages at once and flip between them much as you can on an iPhone. Text and images look superb, and the ability to rapidly zoom and rotate the screen orientation makes reading large pages a breeze. Unfortunately, you're stuck with using Apple's Safari browser.

Netbook: Since it's a PC, a netbook gives you access to any browser you choose. You get full support for Flash, Silverlight, and the like. On the other hand, the screen is small and you can't easily rotate or zoom it the way you can the iPad's display. Sites that don't work well with a netbook's smallish screen and unimpressive resolution are more difficult to view and read than they are on the iPad. And many netbooks, though they support Flash, don't offer enough performance to permit the user to watch high-def video smoothly or to run demanding flash games without bogging down.

Advantage: Netbook. The ability of netbooks to see "the whole Web" and to run any browser you choose give them the advantage, but the iPad's smooth zooming, rotating, and scrolling make the contest on this measure surprisingly close.