Netbooks are boring. I think that if I see another headline announcing the release of another netbook, I am going to vomit. I am not sure how many more variants can be rolled out with the same specs and there be an expectation that anyone will care. Honestly, each major manufacturer should only be producing one netbook. That would give us a total of about 14, and I can not for the life of me see the reason for any more than that on the market. Of the current models, they virtually all have the same specs. There are something near 60 models on the market today, with hundreds of thousands of the things also available in after-markets as models are superseded. I am not sure that any of this is necessary. Netbooks are functional computing commodities, but little else. They meet the needs of the most bland users for the most bland of functions. So, by definition, a whole lot of differentiation is not needed in this particular market sector.I had a netbook once. An Acer Aspire ONE. I enjoyed it a good deal while I owned it, but it did not fulfill the use space I really needed filled. While it was necessary to re-arrange my network mix in order to get to a place where a netbook did not make the most sense, the truth is that it is a network cfg that is better suited to my needs. So when I look back, I question whether I ever needed a netbook in the first place.My own netbook was good for coffee shop deployment, but not the best. It was a neat little ultra-mobile blogging machine. It was neat being able to take off with just my netbook and its very light carry weight. Or take it as a companion to the Gateway FX-6860FX so that I could work on something on the plane (the Gateway was too big).But outside of those 2 or 3 uses where it was good to great, it was a compromise machine for any other use that I tried to use it for. In my network reconfiguration, there were a few items that I bought based on the intended eventual departure of my netbook. The machines that fill that gap are the Acer Aspire Timeline 4810T, my HP 2730p TabletPC, and the Fujitsu U820.OK; right; this list makes it sound like I needed 3 machines to replace one. That is not the case, for issues stretching beyond the context of this article. Besides, we all know that I would have bought 3 machines anyway, so what funcitonality they were initially purchased to cover becomes less important.
The point is that for several functions, the netbook came up short, as many of them do. Do not get me wrong, I am not advocating the wholesale departure of providers from the industry. I am just saying that, since a netbook can only do so much anyway, do we really need the market flooded with 60 different models? And when I say models, I do not simply mean color-swaps. The models that are out there are versions that make one or two tweaks off the baseline and get thrown out on retail with different part numbers.The Aspire ONE did not have a screen as big as my Acer Aspire Timeline. It's keyboard was not as well designed as my HP 2730p's. It did not have the digital ink capability or convertibility of my Fujitsu U820. It did not have the hard drive space or battery life of most of the models I chose to replace it. As much as it was a companion device, I could not pick it up and start writing on it, and so it never became my all-around travel companion. That duty now goes to the Fujitsu U820.In each of these cases, the replacement device that I purchased was only marginally heavier than the Aspire ONE. For the tradeoff being the expanded capabilities that I added to my arsenal for the incremental bump in weight (in the cases where there was), that analysis was a no-brainer.I wish that the rest of the industry would get this figured out; or maybe that consumers would boycott buying netbooks for a week or so. Netbooks don't do a lot. We don't need 60 different machines that all do the same function. And I certainly do not need to read about a new debut of a netbook every day. Ugh. - Vr/Zeux...>>