I bet half the laptop snobs don’t go anywhere near the capability of their machines, and if they do, more power to them, but I know what I need. It’s like bragging about how badass your Ferrari is while driving the speed limit.

I’ve got a machine that does exactly what I need for 1/4 the price, 60% of the weight., and 50% of the volume.

Personally, I hate smart phones. A million features I never use. Read a smartphone review these days… whens the last time any review covered the quality of the antenna, voice quality, or range. All they ever talk about is how good the camera or music player is.

One of these days though, the dream of something the power of a netbook, the size of a smart phone, and can use a external monitor, keyboard, and mouse will come along…. that will be a dream machine.

-Poor for SMS texting, chating, Web surfing
-Stupid to try edit on an Office document (imagine you have to do some VBA =S)
-html browsing very limited
but have some pros
-You can have a real portable audio stream divice (connect to any audio system as a car audio)
-Take a pic and publish it in the fastest way on facebook and others

but a Netbook is less or nothing pretentious than smarphones, im running autocad 08, corel draw x4, adobe flash cs4, office, ares, audio and video converters, windows media, real player, quicktime, itunes etc etc on my acer aspire one!!

In fact im still using my vintage nokia 1100 (the one with the lamp and capable to lid off my beers

phones are to talk,
cameras are to take pictures,
pc’s laptops, netbooks are for computing

Joey – i couldn’t agree with you less. Well, maybe I could. I see your point on the terminal-style net/computers. They never really caught on. But netbooks are already on an entirely different scale. Just look around. They’re producing and selling more models every month. People are actually dropping thier old laptops and moving to smaller, cheaper computers that perform the same tasks. And why shouldn’t they?

In honesty, I believe one of two things. This article was either written just for points on the search engines, or it was based on the very earliest of netbooks, the EEE 701, which was extremely limited as a device. In the case of the EEE 701 and other netbooks like it, I certainly agree. The screen was too small (7 inches and 800×640 WTF??) the keyboard was useless, a 600mhz processor (!!?) and the hard drive was only up to 4 gigs. It was a pile of almost useless crap hardware that only ran a watered-down version of a Linux operating system.

However, netbooks have much better keyboards, screens, full sized 250 gig hard drives and run Windows XP, and Vista, meaning you can install all the same software as you could on your other computers.

-Shrug-

Happy computing!

I’m not going to get into a full heated debate, but there are many tasks that a mobile phone cannot do effectively compared to a netbook. For example, you can’t really effectively use any Window based software on a mobile phone, such as MATLAB or powerpoint. You might argue that you can do it on a Laptop, but 90% of the time, I honestly do not need the full capability of a heavy dual core 15″ screen laptop. A 1.7GHz netbook is more than capable. I move around a lot too, and having a 2lb netbook provides the best compromise compared to a 6lb laptop.

Not to mention that the Intel atom chip used by most netbooks is very fast, very battery efficient, and very cheap. Technology and support for netbooks will only get better.

Who actually owns a netbook and still agrees with the conclusions of this article?

I do. MSI Wind 120. Lived with it for a few weeks, still use it for testing various mobile Linux versions floating around there, like Moblin.

And yes, owning and using one, I still agree with the conclusions of this article, though from my earlier comment it should be clear my conclusion was arrived differently.

That said, if you don’t have a lot of money and want a small portable laptop, I would definitely recommend a small, cheap laptop. However, you’d be silly to think it was something other than a small, cheap laptop.

Who actually owns a netbook and still agrees with the conclusions of this article? Most of the people mocking netbooks have never used one, let alone own one. The last person I told about them thought that their iPod Touch was ‘just as good’.

if you compare an non contract iphone to a netbook the iphone costs 300% more

An iPhone off contract costs $600. What netbook can I buy for $150?

with a swivel hinge and a touchscreen a netbook becomes a tablet that is easily used handheld.

Those definitely cost more than $150, and the interaction still is different.

with the economy in the toilet and the CA interest in open source textbooks and netbooks becoming cheap enough to become the etextbook, schools are going to be purchasing zillions.

California spent about $55 per student last year on textbooks and other instructional materials. You’d have to get netbooks for $165 and make them last three years to fit that budget. A low-end netbook costs about $200 to manufacture. They wouldn’t last three years in kids’ hands; the batteries wouldn’t last three years, period. Even if you could get free content for every class, you’d have no budget for other materials. Computers don’t manage themselves, but you’d have nothing left over for IT. And you’d be spending just as much, when the whole point was to cut the budget.

The Kindle has lower manufacturing costs right now, even with $50 in wireless chips that a textbook replacement doesn’t need. They’d be cheaper still if they were selling in the millions. They’d be easier to administer and probably last longer.

Most likely, though, schools will use print on demand.

Using Joeys own flawed argument I could claim that there is no market for a laptop computer – you’ve got a desktop with a full sized keyboard and big screen when you’re at home, or a smartphone for when you go out.

Joey says to look at what people are buying. When people buy their primary computers, they buy laptops, not desktops.

Nobody would dream of replacing their main computer with a phone.

Nobody would dream of replacing their desktop computer with a laptop. Nobody would dream of replacing their PDA with a phone.

An insightful article over at JoeydeVilla.com that explains why one type of fast food apple pie failed while another did not, and why the netbook will fail as a product category, while smartphones and laptops will not. What’s the connection? Hint…