“Much coverage of this year’s Consumer Electronics Show is full of references to new Netbooks introduced at the show. But in fact, there were hardly any Netbooks at all, and those that did appear went almost unmentioned,” Peter Glaskowsky reports for CNET.
“The truth is, the Netbook is dead, and good riddance. The concept of the Netbook was based on a tragic misunderstanding: the belief that tens, perhaps hundreds of millions of people worldwide wanted a portable computer that was small, power-efficient, and (here’s the misunderstanding) not good for much beyond accessing the Internet,” Glaskowsky reports. “That’s where the “Net” in “Netbook” came from: the Web, e-mail, chat, maybe some VoIP (voice over Internet Protocol communications).”
Glaskowsky reports, “That’s what the earliest Netbooks delivered, too… They were good enough for light Web browsing and e-mail–and not much more… Well, nobody wanted those machines. Companies that tried to sell them saw unprecedented return rates.”
“So what’s left of the Netbook concept? Small displays? C’mon, we’ve had small displays since the dawn of mobile computing. There hasn’t been a day since 1984 when you couldn’t get a laptop with a small display,” Glaskowsky reports. “So these new machines aren’t merely Netbooks that are ‘evolving’ or ‘overachieving.’ They’re notebooks.”
Full article here.
