That article was so deep, my brain is reeling.

"but most netbooks filled the £200-400 space, most congregating at a point north of £300"

There are a handful of the larger/pointless netbooks over the £300 mark for sure but the vast majority of models and sales have got to be <£250 surely?

The Acer Aspire One has a huge market share and thats plenty below the £300 for example.

/pats eee 901 with SSD

....have grown from 7in to 9in to 10in and now 12in.... a continuum of sizes extending through 13.3in, 14in, 15in and 17in to the handful of 18in monsters out there

<snigger>

are probably going to die due to the inability of the manufacturers to realise that a netnook doesn't need a dual core or 160Gb or 12" display .... If you want all that buy a friggin laptop!

It's going to be interesting to see where netbooks do go in a year or so and how the market stands then.

My suspicion is that the market will burn itself out as purchase costs increase, as screen size and other capabilities gets bigger and better. It will just blur into the existing notebook market and that can already be seen to be happening.

It is my belief that it was low cost more than compact design or anything else which surged the market into success and that market is being rapidly abandoned. Unfortunately it seems manufacturers are being pulled upwards by pandering to those who see netbooks as too limited and are missing sight of what earned their gravy. That will keep traditional laptop manufacturer's happy as the price differential reduces and they can sell on better this-or-that and it is then back to the de-facto notebook territory of a year or two ago.

But where does this leave those who jumped at the chance to buy a small, cheap and cheerful netbook as were punted then, and those who would do so now ?

Maybe Asus could come along and offer a close to or sub- £100 small notebook ? Perhaps they could call it a netbook ?

So it should be very small and easy to handle, use a slowish processor, use flash memory for storage, wireless networking (Psion used a plug-in pcmcia card) and use a mobile oriented OS that is not bloated Windows.

If Psion took their original netbook/7 design and upgraded the ARM processor, memory and display, put wireless and usb on board and stuck ubuntu netbook-remix on it then it would be extremely good and if it was the same build quality as the original then I would upgrade mine to a new version straight away 7-)

How many netbook-using angels can dance on the head of a...........................?

This self-indulgent infatuation with a marketing category of small notebook computers is becoming nauseating.

I love my EEE PC 901. There needs to be equivalents of this on the market, perhaps with a slightly more powerful CPU but with the same size screen and solid state HDs.

It has proved to be so useful at work and at home. It is so small I can stuff it in my bag for transporting around and tuck it under my arm when wandering around at work. The 5 hour+ battery life allows me to use it whenever I want away from the mains. I can easily take it to meetings and fire up office/calendar apps. I can use it for a quick bit of web browsing/e-mailing. I can listen to internet radio on it. I can listen to MP3s on it. I can watch films on it. I can read e-books on it. It is small enough to put on a bedside table to watch a bit of iPlayer ot Sky player downloaded content before dozing off and as it uses SSDs it is nearly silent so it doesn't disturb the wife when I'm watching using headphones in bed.

Since I've had this machine I've not used my iPod at all. It is gathering dust somewhere. My proper laptop has become more of a desktop style machine since the EEE PC came. It is not as portable, the battery life sucks but it is much faster so is better used desktop style for intensive work or a lot of typing.

If netbooks become larger, noisier, less battery efficient laptops then the total usefulness of the format will be lost.

I've bought three, and love 'em so much, my stipulation on buying a new coat was I could put it in the pocket.

(One's mine, one's my girlfriends and one's in Kenya at an oprphanage)

A laptop that weighs less than 1 kg.

why is this so hard for some "reporters" or "analysts"?

Silent, 5-6+ hours battery, small enough to chuck into bag but with full keyboard = netbook (eee 901 etc.)

Same as above but too small for a keyboard = electronic book (Kinder 2 etc.)

Noisy, possibly larger, possibly shorter battery life = laptop.

But it's all just usual nonesense marketing categorisation of a continuum.

While Netbooks typically have high quality screens, laptops increasingly have cheap glare displays which are unusable in real life.

Can you imagine the angst in the Microsoft/Intel boardrooms - "we spend billions giving them Core 2 and Vista, and all they're buying is poxy little Atom chips and XP Home. That's my bonus down the toilet. How can they can be so ungrateful?"

Each time I fire up my Samsung NC10 I think - this is not just about back-to-basics computing, it's my little protest at having bloated technology stuffed down my throat for the last twenty years.

Rise up, punters, buy a small, cheap laptop formerly known as a netbook. Join the revolution!

I think that the category of machine will split in two by next year. We will have:

1) Mini notebooks with a screen size of 10 to 12 inches, an HDD, an Atom or Nano x86 processor, about 2 Gbs of ram for a price of around 400€ or more. Most of these will run Windows 7 home and a few will run Linux. They will be aimed at people who want a full x86 computing experience on the go.

2) Real Netbooks with a screen of 5 to 9 inches, an SSD, and ARM processor, about 1 Gb of ram and priced around 200€. these will run Linux or Android with a few machine going for Windows CE. they will be aimed a people who want a machine to surf, listen to music, watch SD Video and do basic office tasks on an expendable, very portable machine with a long battery life, even if it means they don't get the full computing experience they are used to.