Development Notebooks - why so hard?

It seems most notebooks come in only two flavours. HD and Full HD. and then there are netbooks.

HD doesn't have enough vertical pixels for viewing emails etc. So why does anyone use them?

So put hte question out there and got a few suggestions as follows:

Here are some of the responses:

I am running a ASUS G51J with 12GB RAM and FHD.

I'm using a Toshiba R700 with an I7 and a 256 solid state drive.  The fact they use both slots to give the 4GB so you have to chuck away 4GB to get 8GB is annoying.  At 1.1 kg it’s a great travel machine.

I've given up on trying to find a notebook with the resolution to develop and a size that's easy to fly with. So I use a Dell E4300 (13") and the docking station has a Dell U3011 (30" 2560x1600) monitor. I find the height of the monitor is great at 16x10 ratio. The U3011 is expensive but it makes a huge difference. It's like having the whole wall to work with. I'm also done with buying non-commercial grade hardware. I only get Dell Latitudes, no more Studios or XPS machines.

I have used a notebook with 1920 x 1200 screen res for about 5 years. You need to have good eyes since the text is pretty small (unless you change it to a larger DPI setting for text). I find it necessary for most of my work to have a higher res screen. My current laptop is an HP EliteBook 8530W with 8 GB RAM, and 7200 RPM HDD. It runs well for most tasks in development. I also hook it up to a second screen (1920 x 1200) via HDMI and it handles both screens at full res quite well.

As you can see, it was a mixed bag.

I need to carry the notebook so 17inches is too big.

At hte moment it's a choice between the ASUS g53W or the Apple Mac Book Pro.
The Sony one is nice but too expensive considering.
And hte dell xps15 is cheaper but .....not too sure.