Chromebook sales are up amid a decline in the overall PC market. Low prices have helped. If this sounds like Netbook 2.0, it’s not: Chromebooks are a totally different beast and will likely enjoy a long-term market, unlike the lowly netbook.
Goodbye Eee PC and all other netbooks from Asus; the company is no longer producing the small laptops. Acer followed Asus into the netbook market and is following it out as well. What happened to this once quickly growing market? Tablets disrupted the space.
Now that Microsoft’s Windows 8 platform is available for testing, people have to consider where to install it. I have two old netbooks in the closet, just collecting dust; it turns out, netbooks should mostly work for Windows 8, provided you know the limitations and workarounds.
The next time you struggle to buy a gift for the man with everything, consider a $250 set of cufflinks he likely doesn’t have. These aren’t just any old ones; how about a pair that doubles as a 2 GB flash drive and Wi-Fi hotspot?
Got an old netbook? For a $225 Kickstarter pledge, you can turn a netbook into a telepresence robot, remotely controlling it over from a web browser or a smartphone. Over a web connection, you could even use the Oculus robot to speak with remote workers.
Smartphone and tablet maker HTC may dip a toe in the Chromebook pool. But based on reportedly low Chromebook sales, it may be a puddle, not a pool. HTC has shown product innovation before, but does it make sense to build a Chromebook now?
Tablets began outselling netbooks earlier this year, but the small laptops still have their fans. One person created a list of 101 things a netbook can do and it’s a great read. But I’d argue that most consumers are moving away from such traditional computing activities.
Do we only want dumb screens: the ability to get whatever content and services you want over the web instead of locked to a device? Today, the answer is we want it both ways, but in the future, dumb terminals with one exception: the smartphone.
Facing a growing challenge from mobile chips based on ARM architecture, Intel is coining a new name for old devices. Ultrabooks will be sub-$1,000 notebooks that are thin, light and more capable than netbooks. Is this a rehash of the failed CULV experiment from 2009?
If netbook sales are declining, why would Google announce, not one but two new Chromebook devices with Chrome OS? Google’s web expertise has turned data synchronization into a core feature instead of a useful, but tricky add-on that traditional netbooks don’t deliver out of the box.
