Yes, phones are primary machine for a totaly different use-case than a laptop.

Comparing netboas William said, Netbooks will steal market from Laptops. Here there will be a very large segment of people that find/will find Netbooks very appealing; 1) for people who doesn’t care, 2) don’nt want to carry, and 3) more importantly want but *can’t afford* a laptop (this is a very, very large segment); for the latter, note that Netbooks will be given away “for free” by network operators in exchange for a data plan that drives mobile bandwidth usage…

ceo

Netbooks may cannibalize some laptop sales, particularly with the ’subsidized’ netbooks now appearing ($0 with 2 year contract) but Smartphones are were the action is. Part of that is the phenomenal success of Apple’s App Store model, which is driving software development in a way I have not seen in 30 years in this business,

Right on, when I travel for business now I just take my iPhone. It does 90%+ of what I need a laptop for on teh road (e-mail, surf, enter my time into corporate time-tracking app, etc) AND I don’t have to take it out of the bag etc. at the airport for the TSA.

You are so right on this, the smartphone is where the action is and where it will be.

-Mike

But I realized you are probably right.

I want a netbook. Why? Because the Job gives me my very own MacBook Pro. And I want a laptop where I can edit my pictures of nearly naked people and surf the web and not worry about something the corporate IT department tried to use to protect us all from naked people.

At the same time, I don’t need a whole lot of power or storage because I’ve got a desktop stuffed to the gills with hard drives and RAM.

But does it matter if I get a 15″ LCD or a 10″ LCD? Not really, although a 10″ LCD is likely “good enough”. I do know that the early 7-9″ LCD versions were too small to not be displaced by my Windows Mobile smartphone, largely on account of my textual input speeds being no different.

So, yeah, what’s really going on is that the Netbook market is more an aberration and an artificial construction. It’s artificially constructed in that MS won’t sell you XP if the computer is too powerful (allegedly). And it’s an aberration in that if they sold the exact same machine with a 13-15″ LCD it wouldn’t hit the price points right now but will down the road.

You pussy.

Not having a qwerty keyboard on a smartphone (with tactic response) is a real issue.

Think like a student and someone who wants a second machine and you can see netbooks as huge next year, an perhaps for a couple of years more…

… they are not a red herring, but a stepping stone towards what will happen when we get the foldable screen – then the smart phone becomes something useful and big enough. One step further with foldable tacticile feedback touch-screens, and it’s smart-phones all the way – even going up the chain and wiping out many of the smaller notebook too.

So – gave it about 1 month. It wouldn’t run her games, the screen was way too small, the keyboard too small, the machine too slow. It has sat in a drawer for about a year now…

Seriously, I agree that cell phones are where the action will be. Also, netbooks will soon be called notebooks/laptops again (which is what they are), but they aren’t going to go away anytime soon.

Except I really had to make the toss-up between getting myself a new desktop which I need, which I could get for a similar pricepoint, and get something much, much better than what I have or have had in the last little while (was looking at an AMD Phenom II x3 Black Edition / ATI Radeon 4770 system for all my moderate gaming needs)… or go with a netbook so I can actually force myself to go out to a cafe or something and write. I have to admit, when I weigh the two, with summertime in bloom, I’m starting to prefer the latter option seeing as how I can always game on my XBox 360, so it’s not like I NEED a gargantuan desktop overclockable to 3.2Ghz with a potentially unlockable fourth core (I’m just a geek and want one, really).

Hence my looking at the ASUS N10J-A1/A2 – a netbook sized/priced (well, almost) with a discrete video card in the form of the NVidia GeForce 9300. Unfortunately, although everyone who’s gotten one seems to be happy with it (and they say it gets a lot of second glances when whipped out in public- that came out all wrong), it still seems to be too much of a compromise between the more expensive and larger option of a gaming laptop (which can easily run into the $1600-$3000 range) and a regular netbook ($300ish) and still not handle HD video well, or have a large enough screen/resolution for gaming purposes. That, and I’d still need to get a portable USB slim drive, so tack $70-80 to the total.

So… I’d consider waiting for dual Atom for netbooks (not just servers) or hope that NVidia and OEMs will start putting out Ion-powered netbooks in the next couple of months.

However, the current sale price at Infonec in the GTA for the N10J-A1 has me mighty tempted.

Any suggestions for an alternate solution would be most welcome.