What’s in Store for the Future of Netbooks?

By Nov. 2, 2009, 3:50pm PT 17 Comments

asuseeepc7014gkctofel_2It’s hard to believe it, but it’s almost two years to the day that I took delivery of my first netbook. Actually it wasn’t called a netbook back then — it was more of a spinoff idea from the OLPC project. It doesn’t matter what you called it; my Asus Eee PC 701 was a fun little machine. The device was useful, too. Every post I wrote from the 2008 Consumer Electronics Show was banged out on that little unit, although I had replaced the stock Linux build with XP by that point. Oh, the memories…

 

My Eee PC 701 was sold to a jkOnTheRun reader, but it spawned my then-future interest in netbooks. Two years later, I still use one (or two), but the device has matured as consumers play a tug-of-war with manufacturers. We want more memory, but support constraints sometimes overrule our desires. Some of us want higher resolutions, but we generally — but not always — have to move up to a different device class. All in all, the netbook market was born and quickly matured in a phenomenally short amount of time, all things considered. Some would call my original Eee PC totally unusable, and for them, that might be accurate. But there are a plethora of usable netbooks out there now that are appealing to a wide audience. The recent sales numbers don’t lie — netbooks showed one of the few growth signs in the PC market over the past year or so.

I have little doubt that this trend will continue for at least another year or two, but what happens after that? Peggy Albright tries to answer that question as well as others in a 27-page report on netbooks over at GigaOm Pro (subscription required). The netbook future that Peggy envisions includes:

  • A new ecosystem — I see glimpses of this with the Moblin project, and more specifically, the Moblin Garage. Early netbooks were constrainted just like UMPCs when dialog boxes and such simply didn’t fit. And considering my Eee PC 701 had an 800 x 480 display, that was most of them!
  • Fragmentation — Netbooks have been pretty uniform and cookie-cutter to date, so I did a double-take when I read this. But there are some signs of life in the slow moving smartbook market, which could indeed fragment the netbook space.
  • The definition of a netbook will change — This goes along with the fragmentation point. Today we consider netbooks to be x86 devices with a desktop operating system. Next year, that could change as ARM takes the stage and non-traditional operating systems like Google’s Chrome OS and the aforementioned Moblin gain traction.

I can’t predict the future any better than Peggy can, but she has some solid analysis in this report. I think folks are still stuck on the idea of netbooks as “little laptops,” which of course, they are. But thinking about them solely as such limits the possibilities and use cases, in my opinion. And the hardware improvement making these devices far more usable haven’t come at too steep a price. My Eee PC was $399 in 2007. A far better MSI Wind was $599 a year later, but now is around half of that price. And my new Toshiba NB205 costs $399, but offers roughly three times the battery life of that first netbook.

What do you expect to see in the future netbook market?

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
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