Netbooks & M.tv compatible devices
What are netbooks ?
Netbooks are a category that emerged in 2007-2008, they are stripped down laptops and they do most of the work of a laptop for far less cost. The netbook category fits in between the smart mobile phone such as an iPhone and the laptop. Their most significant contribution is a decent sized keyboard and a keyboard on which it is easy to type:
Netbooks also go by the name of UMD (Ultra mobile devices), UMPCs (Ultra mobile PCs) MID (Mobile Internet Devices). Netbooks can also be seen as PDAs (Personal Digital Assistants) with a decent keyboard. Asus of Taiwan started manufacturing them in 2007 and from a market category of zero they are growing at over 100% per year. Asus themselves were inspired by the OLPC The One Laptop per Child initiative of MIT Media Labs who set out to produce a laptop for $100 in 2005. Netbooks are very much cheaper than laptops because:
- All the heavy and expensive processing has been stripped out (you cannot easily operate high graphic resolution games on them nor very processing power hungry programs such as Photoshop)
- The arrival of the Atom chip from Intel made the processor very much expensive, but there are others, Via, ARM, nVidia...
- Even Microsoft has reduced the price of its operating system to about $10 to $15 per machine
Where can I get a netbook?
Dell, HP, www.expansys.com, pixmania.com, almost any large supermarket (yes, they are that low cost!).
Sources of supply
Netbooks are a fast moving and fast changing category so it is best to go direct to the re-sellers or to the websites of the manufacturers:
Re-sellers:
Manufacturers (non-exhaustive):
Asus, Acer, Dell, Lenova, MSI Wind, Samsung, Zelybron
Some relevant articles:
http://www.economist.com/business/displaystory.cfm?story_id=13832588
Other interesting sites:
- Type "netbook" into http://www.youtube.com
- Wikipedia is as always very helpful and informative: http://www.wikipedia.org
- try also http://www.liliputing.com/
- and the grand site of computer news, http://www.engadget.com