Photo credit: Convergence. The Psion Series 5 lacked proper connectivity (infrared port, anyone?) but it had a great keyboard, amazing battery life and could fit in a (big) pocket.
Netbooks -- aka mini-notebooks -- are the surprise hits of this year's tech market. Asus has sold more than a million of its groundbreaking Eee PCs, and other manufacturers have jumped on the bandwagon with mini computers of their own. Who knew that consumers would be so excited about super-portable, inexpensive, easy-to-use laptops?
But these hatchlings are far from fully formed. The basics are certainly there, but we need more. Specifically, netbooks need five things before they can turn into a full-blown, mass-market phenomenon.
Minimum Four-Hour Battery Life
This is the biggie. For a netbook to be truly useful, it needs to remain "on" for more than an hour and a half. Four hours is the minimum, and with the chunky, heavy extended batteries, some netbooks can manage this (on paper at least). Ideally, though, they should run all day long without visiting a power socket. Impossible? My first cellphone could barely make it through a working day, and only then if I didn’t make any calls.
Ubiquitous Wireless Connectivity
The second most important feature is "always on" internet access. You need a 3-G broadband card for those times when there is no WiFi available. The problem is, this effectively turns your machine into a moneymaker for the cellphone carriers. Mobile internet is still at the stage the home internet was at in the 1990s. You dialed in and paid for every minute you were online. The free ISPs changed that, offering unlimited time.
The difference now is that you get stung for bandwidth. At the same time the telcos promote mobile TV and music streaming, they limit the amount of data you can have. True unmetered bandwidth will come, but until then, netbooks will be painful, or expensive, to use properly.
Well-Executed, Basic Hardware
It’s almost there. The Intel Atom chipset has become the netbook standard, and with good reason: The MSI Wind, when running OS X, offers similar performance to the 1.6 GHz G5 PowerMac. Taking netbooks to the next level, hardware-wise, requires only a few tweaks. What we don’t need are power-hungry discrete graphics cards (we’re looking at you, Asus), or fancy backlit keyboards. We need the basics done right: Decent speakers, comfortable keyboards and trackpads that do something other than send the cursor careening around the screen.
Tough Construction
Not Panasonic Toughbook tough, but at least ruggedized for life on the road. Dell’s Inspiron Mini 9 is a step in the right direction with its splashproof keyboard, but we need something that will take a few knocks. It’s bad enough having to bring a power-brick along with you — you don't want to add a padded case, too.
Apple actually got this right with the second generation iBook. Provided the screen didn’t take a direct hit, you could drop the polycarbonate and magnesium iBook all day long and it would keep on going. If those things had had SSDs, they would have been almost indestructible.
Apple
The major PC makers are all moving in to the netbook market, the latest being Toshiba. But there’s one significant player missing — Apple.
Granted, Apple has never been first to the game (with the exception of the mouse-driven GUI on the Mac), but it always brings innovation. You can be sure that there are some MacBook Nanos somewhere inside the secret underground Cupertino, California labs. There’s certainly a demand: in installing OS X on a Medion Akoya Mini I discovered a huge community of people putting Apple’s OS onto tiny computers.
Who knows exactly what we will see? Whatever it is, one thing is certain. The rest of the industry will realize that their products are suddenly two years out of date.
This list is, of course, not exhaustive. Add in your wish lists below. What do you want from your netbook?
