Death of the Netbook

       Is it death throes for the netbook in the age of tablets?      

According to this Stuff article, netbooks are on the brink of extinction. Most people may not be aware of this, I guess because they have long since stopped buying them.

What is a netbook?

Well, the term has always confused me and I doubt I'm alone in this.  When netbooks first became fashionable accessories they tended to have a maximum screen size of 10", 1 or  maybe 2GB of RAM, no optical drive and a pretty low resolution screen and graphics capability.  They often ran Windows XP (Vista was a dog so they fell back to the old faithful).  Some ran Linux but that I think was more to keep the price down.

They were popular because they gave people access to surf the web when away from home plus they had a keyboard that made elementary word processing and email tasks not too onerous.  No-one ever expected them to be your first or only choice of computer - they were very much a carry-around websurfer.

New kids on the block

All hail the conquering tablet

So what happened?  Well, the tablet came and blasted them out of the water.  Check the boxes of the netbook versus tablet and it's not hard to see why.  Both will let you surf the web, email, Skype, and store documents and pictures.  But consider what else the tablet can do and it's obvious why netbooks have had their day.

Is the chromebook a worthy successor?

If a tablet's not your thing, perhaps a worthy successor to the traditional netbook is the chromebook.  Like the netbook, this device is limited in power with a very basic hardware configuration.  It relies on its internet connectivity to use the Google Chrome operating system environment to provide all its applications and storage from the 'cloud'.

The market supports plenty of small portable notebooks that are considerably more capable than the netbook ever was. Indeed, some of today's ultrabooks have amazing specifications and a price to match.

Sleek sexy ultrabooks are a long way from the netbook

The netbook was a short love affair but one that I fear will soon be forgotten with just a very small entry in the annals of computing history.

Cheap netbook on the brink of extinction (Stuff)

Sayonara netbook (Guardian UK)

Death of the netbook (LoF)

The ASUS eeePC (Wikipedia)

The Netbook (Wikipedia)