Netbooks on their way out… official!

Mike Halsey | Dec 30, 2009 | View Comments

It’s still the silly season and the sheer volume of technology stories that are not really to be taken seriously continues unabated. The latest of these is a report by the BBC in which they quote several technology journalists and bloggers who are saying, wait for it, that the pace of technology is moving very quickly and the day of the netbook will soon be over! SHOCK!

Clearly there’s not a lot to write about technology-wise during the holiday period, though there’s still plenty going on, they just have to look for it. It’s no secret to anybody that the pace of technology has moved considerably in the last couple of years with new innovations coming out regularly that are genuinely revolutionising the world of mobile computing.

One of the biggest of these is Intel’s low power Atom processor, the chip which has made netbooks possible. However there are also technologies like multi-touch, large touch-screen phones and ebook readers which will have a huge impact on the netbook market. We’ve all seen it coming for ages now and it’s hardly a surprise.

Quite what effect these will have long term is anybody’s guess but, yes, it’s safe to assume that the netbook as we know it today will quickly morph into something else.

My assumption is that it will be Apple who lead the way in this. An Apple tablet has been rumoured for a long time now and we could see an unveiling as early as next month. Tablet technology, the big up and coming thing every year since 2002, could finally be coming of age. People are adjusting to touch screen keyboards as keyboard-less mobile phones become the norm, and many of these including Apple’s iPhone have hinted at just how successful such devices could be.

Then there’s the ongoing debate about what we actually use netbooks for. Google’s kicked this one off and genuinely got the world thinking about it. There are a huge volume of people who don’t use their PC or laptop unless they have a net connection. They store everything in the cloud already, email etc. and aren’t heavy PC users so cloud apps for occasionally producing a word processed document or spreadsheet are as easily used in the cloud as anything else.

Google are stipulating that devices running their Chrome OS mustn’t come with a hard disk but instead with flash memory. They’ve not publicly stated yet how much or little this would be, but I can imagine it’ll be small enough to prevent Windows 7 being installed on the devices.

This could kick-start another revolution in device design with a merging of netbooks, ebook readers and small tablets becoming the device many will choose to own. No fiddly unnecessary keyboard, just an easy to use and most importantly consumer-focused device that will allow people to do the computing tasks they do the most. Microsoft have already shown how one such device could look with the Courier concept (below).

So the netbook’s on it’s way out. Most certainly this is true, but is it news? For one I’m certainly looking forward to the news in 2010 of what might come to replace it. Now that’s exciting!