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Can Crowdfunding Bring Back The Netbook? (salon.com)
"The mini-laptop's market niche got swamped by the iPad and the phablet," writes Salon, since the stripped-down hardware of tablets made them cheaper to produce. But now netbooks could be making a grassroots-fueled comeback, "thanks to the lower costs in electronics manufacturing and the fact that individual investors can come together to crowdfund projects." An anonymous reader quotes Salon:
Michael Mrozek, the Germany-based creator of creator of the DragonBox Pyra, says "I never understood why they were gone in the first place. I have no idea why you would use a tablet. I tried one, and it's awkward to use it for anything else than browsing the Web"... He has already managed to raise several hundred thousand dollars through a private pre-order system set up on his geek's paradise online store. Once those initial orders have been filled, Mrozek said he will probably start up a mainstream crowdfunding campaign for his Linux handheld... "The niche was always there, but thanks to the Internet and crowdfunding, it's easy to reach everyone who's interested in such a device so even a niche product still gets you enough users to sell it. That wasn't possible 10 years ago."
Meanwhile, in just under two weeks Planet Computer raised $446,000 on Indiegogo, more than double the original $200,000 goal for their netbook-like Gemini computer (with a keyboard designed by the creator of the original Psion netbook). Planet's CEO Janko Mrsic-Flogel says "It's a bit like Volkswagen bringing back the Beetle," and predicts that the worldwide demand for netbooks could reach 10 million a year.
Meanwhile, in just under two weeks Planet Computer raised $446,000 on Indiegogo, more than double the original $200,000 goal for their netbook-like Gemini computer (with a keyboard designed by the creator of the original Psion netbook). Planet's CEO Janko Mrsic-Flogel says "It's a bit like Volkswagen bringing back the Beetle," and predicts that the worldwide demand for netbooks could reach 10 million a year.
small? yes, keyboard comfy enough? some, specs?, piece of shit machines that were locked to having max 2 gb ram, who the fuck thought that was ever a good idea
Do we really want (or need) the Netbook back? As I recall, they were a product that did little more than make people wish they had saved the money to buy something that was actually capable of meeting their basic needs. These days everyone has a cellphone which is already infinitely better than the netbook of yesterday.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
Given that, at the time they both launched, the described use cases for tablets and netbooks didn't really overlap much... it's hard to see how one could blame tablets for the failure of netbooks. It's really only been the past two or three years that there's been any traction with regards to "iPads as word processors" - and, even now, I don't see this done very often.
In our university department, I know a number of people who bought netbooks because they were small, light, and inexpensive. What they then found out was they were also severely underpowered and had too little built-in storage and memory. One of our professors brought one to us and said "I want to run Cadence and Matlab on this" - yeah, good luck with that.
It seemed like none of the people who bought them actually kept using them for more than a month or two.
There are lots of small, light, and useable laptops on the market now. If there ever was a "netbook niche", I'm not sure it still exists.
#DeleteChrome
In my opinion, netbooks went into oblivion when Windows became the OS of choice by the manufacturers. There are other factors to take into as well, like very slow HDDs that hold more data (nice for marketing purposes) rather than SDDs, and poor TN-film screens.
As I would imagine a lot of people are not fans either, they are slow, even the current models, the screens are small, which would be ok if their resolution didnt suck, keyboards are hard to type on, and they are heavier than their tablet counterparts
sent from a 12 inch 1.2ghz netbook cause I just happen to be hacking one up to use in a mini mame cab
Asus still makes them. Transformer. I've got 2 of them and love em. They are not powerhouse machines, but bang for buck, I'm more than pleased. Same footprint as the original Asus Eee 10" netbooks but maybe half as thick. And you can pop the screen off the keyboard and use it as a tablet..... to which I rarely ever do that. Look on Amazon, you can find them for around $300-ish. I suggest getting the one with 4 gigs of ram.
yeah no thanks. Can get a cheapo android tablet for less than 100 and a bluetooth keyboard for like 30.
Netbooks disappeared because the hardware simply wasn't good enough at the time; i should know i have an asus atom netbook gathering dust in a drawer. Once the hardware caught up, was powerful enough without killing the battery within 45 minutes, android tablets took over the market and there doesn't seem any point in going back.
If you want a mobile workstation then get a laptop/ultrabook.
Netbooks are cheap, almost disposable, laptops with small screens. Today all you can get are cheap, almost disposable, laptops with medium sized screens.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
I would like to see netbooks come back. The original concept was a smash hit- small size, excellent battery life, SSD, and running Linux, all at a small price. Lots of reasons led to their demise- Microsoft hostility, powerful phones, tablets, and client-side browser load increase were probably the three biggest.
I think there might still be a market for something small, inexpensive, and different. Maybe not a big market, but something with unlocked dual-boot Android and Linux with physical keyboard, larger than the largest phones but smaller than the smallest laptops (notebooks). Where having a keyboard and good, SWAPPABLE battery trumps being stupidly thin.
Oh, the Gemini PDA isn't it... too expensive, too small. Cool, no doubt, but it is more of a phone factor.
No tilde? No backtick? This would just annoy me on Linux.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
Oh wait, it's basically a small, low powered, awful screen version of a 2-in-1 tablet with a keyboard. The consumer space between cheap, entry level 13" laptop and tablet/2-in-1 with detachable keyboard / keyboard case is pretty small. I had a spare netbook until a few years ago (gave it to a buddy for a case of craft beer I couldn't get at home). Literally the only thing from keeping me to use my original iPad as a netbook is that many of the apps I'd use require a new iOS version. Resolution isn't admittedly that great but you can pick up an iPad 3rd gen with a keyboard for under 200 bucks and it has double the resolution. If you're willing to go Android, that price drops even further.
Now we've got airs that have 11.6" screens, fully integrated keyboard, and weigh a few ounces more than ye olde macbooks.
Is why would anyone want to? Buy a tablet and keyboard cover and crowdfunding something worthwhile.
I never understood why they were gone in the first place. I have no idea why you would use a tablet. I tried one, and it's awkward to use it for anything else than browsing the Web
Unlike netbooks, which were awkward to use for anything including browsing the web. It was codeword for a really cheap, really crappy laptop with a tiny and poor screen, an anemic Atom processor, too little RAM and the slowest HDD you could find. No laptop user would choose it unless they very literally can't afford anything better, I had one because I normally use a desktop and just needed a cheap piece of shit I wouldn't spend much on and could afford to lose/damage. My use case is now fully replaced by a smartphone, I don't even need a tablet/phablet. Besides, aren't Chromebooks the current day netbooks? Or if you really want they have netbooks with Win10. Not that I'd touch that with a ten foot pole.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
To whoever it appeals to, it's the greatest thing ever. To everyone else, it'll seem like a pointless waste of time.
I find my android smartphone greatly limiting, but that's only because my use-cases are things most people wouldn't want to do on a pocket-sized device anyway, while I rarely do anything that most people use their pocket sized device for.
I'm glad the highly niche devices are around, but they clearly aren't for everyone.
only if its a netbook in size those 1-2gig atoms even when dual core really sucked and 1-2gig ram gah.
Into chromebooks. We don't need to go backwards.
Tablets and ebook readers already do everything the so called "netbook" does. What exactly are you going to get rid of to reduce the cost further?
About the only way I can think of to reduce the price that can't be applied to a tablet/ebook reader is to:
1) Remove the touch screen and add back in a mouse
2) Increase the thickness of the hardware, to allow for cheaper parts.
I can't see that working. The touch screen is worth the extra cost, and no one wants a thicker, heavier tablet, unless it is less than $40. I can't see it working.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
You don't need a keyboard to consume visual media in particular. The keyboard is dead weight to people who don't touch-type.
Or you can buy a tablet and a roll-up keyboard. Get the worst of both worlds. Anyone I knew who bought a netbook bought them because they were cheaper than laptops - they're a niche product whose niche is gone. Or do you really think people are going to bother toting around netbooks instead of phones and tablets? (or if they need a laptop, a phone and laptop)?
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
I loved the EEE PC, for me, it was a way to run any distro I wanted on a portable device that I could bring anywhere. I would often bring it with me whenever I needed to showcase my work.
However, I feel as if what replaced it for most people (that did not just get them to save a buck), was single-board systems like RPI. I would always plug in an external monitor + keyboard on these things anyway, because their keyboards and screens were just waaaaaaay to small to do anything useful.
The 1GB RAM or the 2GB RAM currently offered by most Chromebooks etc, are just way to low, I would love to see a 4-8GB RAM netbook running on Intel HW for a decent price (100-150USD), but if that does not happen, I'll stick to my 15-17" laptop, even if its often impractial.
yep. free. rescued a Tablet from the trash last week (well, they were going to throw it in the trash). my Netbook was my nephew's.
Yes.
Netbooks were replaced by tablets and convertibles. Netbooks have no place in today's market. For the extremely low performances they offer, a tablet can do just as well.
During a time when I "worked from home", I would travel frequently. On one such trip, my laptop I used for work died. I needed one ASAP, so ordering online wasn't an option. I walked into BestBuy (not really any other option with where I was at the time). I just needed something to get me by until I returned home to my normal workstation, so I pick up a cheap Acer Aspire One 10" netbook for $300. This was I think five or six years ago now. This netbook is awesome, it has 2 DIMM slots in it, so I was able to move over the 8GiB of RAM from the dead laptop over to the netbook. All these years later, the thing is still working like a champ. It fits nicely instead of my camera backpack and use it to dump photos while on the go, with slow but functional support for the latest Lightroom and Photoshop. The thing also has wired gigabit ethernet, so it always travels with me when I'm working on-site for tech clients. Had a city-wide power outage recently where I was able to quickly hop into the server room with this thing, plug it in, and get to work monitoring the rack of server, AV, and phone equipment while running on emergency power.
Looking at what is being offered by the link provided, it is just yet ANOTHER random Android device. Cool, I guess? But it wouldn't be able to do any of the actual WORK that I would need it to do. It is essentially just a phone/tablet with an attached keyboard. If I wanted that, there are things like the Transformer Prime from Asus. Or if I wanted to shell out actual money, there are Surface tablets from Microsoft. The thing being offered now adds no real functionality over the existing offerings whatsoever.
I have a Lenovo X131e, that I replaced the HDD with an SSD, that gets more use than my tricked out desktop machine. It runs Win7 x64, is mostly used for browsing, but can handle anything from Word to pro audio just fine. It's not tiny or superlight, but it's just the right size to carry around the house, and it's built like a tank.
A tablet is just an oversized phone, but a netbook is really useful.
That's what the majority of people used a computer/laptop for, before tablets took over.
#DeleteFacebook
Did you read the same comment I posted? You aren't responding to it.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
No.
Loved this. A updated replacement would be nice.
It's called choice,all you posters who hate netbooks,guess what,nobody is going to force you to buy one,nobody is going to force you to give up what you have chosen to use,some of us would just like the choice of using one..
Just like some of us would like a mobile phone that has not first been drawn by some "designer" and then engineers have to fit everything into that.
Some of us "normal" people can actually lift more than 8 ounces,can hold a device thicker than 8mm and would like a nice unbendable chassis,thick plastic body,slide out qwerty,swappable battery etc etc,we don't all wear aramani suits,nor give a flying fuck what the poseur with the 1k smartphone that they can barely use is carrying..
Run away everybody the laptop ss are coming,hide your netbooks..
Just go to Walmart and buy one -- HP Stream, etc.
Strange things are afoot at the Circle-K.
tablets with bluetooth keyboards caught up with them quickly on price/performance as long as you don't mind working on ios or android, ASUS even makes the transformer tablet that actually docks to the keyboard if you need more rigidity than a tablet with a flip case
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
I have keyboards that cost more than some netbooks. If I want a small lightweight laptop, I'll get a 12-inch sub-notebook like the macbook air or thinkpad x270. It doesn't have to be cheap if it can hold up and last me a long time.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Perhaps that's true for the people you know. When I was a student, having a tiny lightweight computer with a real keyboard that ran a real OS was great for writing papers and code. Not so much for compiling huge programs, but a little python work? No problem. Having an Ethernet port built in and all the standard Linux network utilities came in handy more than once for onsite network troubleshooting.
Not bad for such a small machine. Oh yeah, I guess it was inexpensive as well. So yeah, netbooks are useless.
Tablets and phablets didn't kill netbooks alone, pricing and other options did.
I imagine some Linux hardcore users would want a cheap-o laptop with paltry specs to tinker with, but the majority of the market is not interested in that.
With netbooks, you could at most browse a bit, check e-mails and do the very basic stuff that any smartphone or tablet can do better today, even the extremely cheap ones. And then, with the advent of Chromebooks, you can even get a Windows 10 laptop positioned to compete with it, with prices under 200 bucks.
I don't think a single guy experience on trying to use an Android tablet for productivity and finding it "awkward" is reason enough to ressurect a line of products that are justifiably dead. Honestly, plenty of people can use Android tablets for productivity well enough, and keyboard accessories ranging from horrible to excellent are already out there. Go on eBay and search for Android laptop if form factor is an issue. Android already has a cleaner and more intuitive interface, and apps like the full Microsoft Office suite, with data synchronization and other native features to boot.
Nowadays you can also get cheap Windows laptops, tiny desktops like a Kangaroo PC (there's even a Kangaroo laptop with a weird design), stick computers or even something like Gole 1 that can dual boot between Windows and Android.
You can build your own portable with something like a Raspberry Pi.
Not to mention Chromebooks among other devices for productivity.
Honestly, I think it's kinda stupid to try to revive netbooks at this point, personal opinion as a business thing. It'll be an extremely niche market that will fail to scale.
I'd be all for a Linux tablet though, for personal usage. Not that I think there's a market for that too. What Linux needs these days is to get ported, adapted and get support for devices like smartphones and tablets, not to keep trying to go back in time. Yes, I know Android is based on Linux, but I'm talking about other distros. I know Ubuntu has a version for mobile devices, but those are too limited and impossible to find in the market.
I'm not a hater or anything like that. I've just converted an old laptop that was laying around into an Ubuntu machine to tinker with. I just don't see a market for netbooks anymore. What we had back then were schools and businesses willing to pay a little for underpowered laptops running Linux for the very basics... but that has changed.
Furthermore, you know what Netbooks sound like for your average consumer? Extremely underpowered and horrible to deal with devices. Garbage. Expired electronics. Failed strategy. Outdated and deprecated. Something lying in a storage space somewhere with a ton of dust on top. A waste of not a whole lot of money. Outside of Linux evangelists, that's what I mostly hear. Would you want a netbook for work/school/business? Ewww no, gtfo of here with that.
I can almost guarantee you that most people, if offered a netbook, would rather:
1. Spend a bit more on a more capable device - Chromebook, Linux or Windows;
2. Get a bluetooth/OtG keyboard and mouse and use their own smartphones/tablets instead;
3. Get nothing and keep using whatever they have instead of having to carry an extra device running an OS that they'll need to learn how to deal with.
Netbooks are dead, let them go gracefully. If you are going to release a new product with similar objectives, call it something else.
Apparently it is "awkward to use it for anything else than browsing the Web"
But guess what 99% of the population want to use their portable device for...
Then add the fact that netbooks are also awkward for almost everything except browsing the web, because the screen and the keyboard are too small.
In addition, browsing the web is better with the screen in portrait mode, than in landscape mode, so the netbook is not even better at that.
I'm sure there are use cases for netbooks, and I loved my Asus netbook when I got it, but I think I have only used it a handful of times since I got myself a Nexus 7
$100 or less, 2-4 GB of RAM, WiFi AND Ethernet, and AMD or x86 option. That's about the only way it will work. Otherwise, your better off building your own Raspberry Pi laptop. 7" touch screens for them are only ~$20-$30. The Pi is about $35. A keyboard with trackpad about $15. An ok web cam about $15. Power supply about $10. You could use a USB battery life extender to make it more "laptopish." They even have solar chargeable ones for $20 now.
I just paid US$50 for a (used) 2-gig Dell Mini 9 with an SSD. It runs perfectly (and decently fast) as a hackintosh, and it runs apps for Windows 10 just fine, too.
Yes too
Walk into any Best Buy or Walmart and there will be a usable $200 Windows netbook I actually had a $200 HP stream 12 for a year and a half. It bundled with a year of Office (which I need, and think is much better than Libre), so that's like $80 off the $200. Worked perfectly for work and browsing web and online grad school. Tiny computer, no moving parts, I would just bring it along on trips without thinking about it. I could play Civ 5 on lowest settings, ha.
The two issues were the 32 Gigs of hard drive, with maybe 20 Gigs free after installing the OS and Office and basic apps. The 32gb drive ensured you would only want the computer if you used it as a 2nd computer or just for the most basic uses, although I guess you could use a USB 3.0 key drive, or an SD card. And the 2 GB of RAM was kind of a limiter, but really not a big deal. I know the latest rendition of the Stream has 4GB of RAM, which I imagine is fine.
I really liked the computer, but when it broke due to much abuse I went for a Macbook. If Windows 10 didn't suck so much I'd probably get another one.
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
Was it simply the cheapness of netbooks that made them compelling? If so, why do we not consider Chromebooks as having filled that void. Netbooks started out cheap because they ran (stripped down) Linux distros that could run on the minimal hardware. Well, Chromebooks do that today - with fewer compromises in performance (for what they can do). And you can load a full Linux distro on them, so the hackers that loved netbooks are also satisfied.
Of course, Netbooks ultimately changed into cheap Windows PC's once Microsoft felt a threat. But they were lousy Windows PC's and limited to small screens by Microsoft's deal on the cheap OS licenses. Chromebooks are not limited in screen size, have decent keyboards and trackpads and mainly just skimp on local storage these days. So, I guess if you need lots of local storage and/or need to run Windows, then sure - the cheapest mainstream laptops will provide you with a suitably shitty Windows experience. But if you need something that fills the niche that netbooks were originally intended to fill, a Chromebook is the thing - unless, of course, you're fine with a cheap tablet...
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...
Indeed. I can get quite a few "notebooks" here that would have been called "netbooks" during the hype. This seems to be fake news (alternate facts?) designed to make the gullible buy something they can get significantly cheaper elsewhere.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
The second you cite Salon, you might as well be quoting Breitbart.
What is your definition of a 'medium sized screen'? I have a Lenovo 110S Ideapad, which has an 11.6" screen, which I bought new about 1/2 a year ago for $114USD. I consider that to be the logical successor to the netbooks that I've owned in the past (Asus 900S, Gateway lt1009), which I paid more for at the time. I'm running Linux on it atm.
Sure I was. I pointed out that you can just get a keyboard and you have a WAY better, WAY cheaper solution than either of these pieces of under-specced crap. (Did you check out the prices? Insane!).
Or if you really don't want to carry around a keyboard, use speech-to-text. It's a thing nowadays, no keyboard needed. These over-priced way-underspec'd pieces of crap are a disgrace. Look at the picture in the summary section. They say you can use this to do spreadsheets - I say it's just proof that this will let people go blind without bothering to track down porn. The device does not exist, and its' chance of coming to fruition is not so great.
Their weasel words say they've produced a physical model - but if you read further, no guts. In other words, right now it's all show, no go. The "spec" comes with a big asterisk - that this is their goal, not their current design.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
My Acer Aspire One AOA150 is real netbook - Atom N270, 1GB RAM, 1024x600 screen, 120 GB HDD. Cost me $400 back in September, 2008. Not exactly cheap at the time. My HP Stream 11 is a netbook too (I think) - Celeron N2840, 2GB RAM, 1366x768 screen, 32 GB eMMC. Cost me $179 a year and a half ago plus another $20 for a 64 GB mini flash drive. That I'd call that cheap.
Geology - it's not rocket science; it's rock science
Most netbooks were full fledged PCs able to run Windows, had ethernet and full-sized USB ports.
What they offer is just a small tablet with a keyboard. In fact you could just buy a small BT keyboard and use the smartphone you already have.
With Windows 8, the assumption that folks would use a touch screen. Win8 didn't port over to Atom based netbooks.
I used an Asus 1000HE netbook for many years with WinXP. It served me well. When XP became old, I moved Win7 to the hardware. It was pretty slow. I tried buying an Asus Netbook running Linux. The software was OK but the hardware was a disappointment (a surprise for Asus as they generally make pretty good hardware). I ended up having to return the unit because it had wireless connectivity problems. I need to move Linux on to one of the netbooks.
I liked the compact size and battery life of the netbooks. I have tablets that I use but they're useless for typing text. Same with phones in my opinion.
Now, I just use a laptop either running Linux or Win7. I like a real keyboard because I type and I write more than one word or one line responses to emails, etc (and here :-) When Win7 goes away, I won't be using a Microsoft solution due to their "phone home" policies and forced update crap. Their days are numbered with me.
The only viable solution I see for netbooks is for them to run Linux.
Microsoft doesn't give a damn about netbooks now, nor did they after WinXP IMHO.
Did anyone actually follow the links? The crowdfunded device that the summary is talking about would never fit the definition of a netbook. Both the keyboard and the display are way smaller than anything that I'm aware of that was sold as a netbook. The original Asus EEE models had a 7" screen, the successors had a 9" screen (the size that I preferred). Eventually the devices sold as netbooks had a 10" screen, which is perhaps a bit bigger than I like. The closest thing to a netbook these days has an 11.6" screen (acceptable as a netbook, but not ideal).
Better? Have you tried to run eclipse on a fondleslab? Dev Studio? Photoshop? Gimp? Unity? A decent local database? You're posting on /.
I'm not arguing in favor of crowdsourced netbooks, just in favor of _cheap_, semi disposable laptops that already exist.
Even if you have great connectivity, can you run a terminal server client on android?
Speech to text? Just no.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
I don't see the need. Generally people carry around a phone and if they need a laptop they buy one with the specs that they need. Plenty of choise in the laptop market. Between the phone and laptop i see no gap for a third device to carry around.
yeah no thanks. Can get a cheapo android tablet for less than 100 and a bluetooth keyboard for like 30.
Netbooks disappeared because the hardware simply wasn't good enough at the time; i should know i have an asus atom netbook gathering dust in a drawer. Once the hardware caught up, was powerful enough without killing the battery within 45 minutes, android tablets took over the market and there doesn't seem any point in going back.
If you want a mobile workstation then get a laptop/ultrabook.
I got a $50 7" Android 6 tablet + a $10 bluetooth universal 7" keyboard & stand. I added a bluetooth mouse. You can add USB OTG for plugging in storage, keyboard, mouse. I can ssh & tunnel to home from Wifi, do google docs, run chrome, ebooks, youtube.
If it had > 1GB RAM, it'd be enough for a remote access laptop. With only 1GB of RAM, it lags when running more than 1 app at a time. Any tablet with more RAM seems to cost as much as a chromebook which I could run Linux on and do more.
If only they had 7" chromebooks.
The problem is that a tablet/phablet is not a decent productivity tool. It's great for media consumption and maybe social media, but lousy for real work. The tools aren't right, the multitasking really isn't right, and most of the bluetooth keyboards are pretty inadequate.
I have an old Acer netbook, circa 2009, that still works well and I'm much more productive on that than I am on my much more expensive tablet.
https://www.amazon.com/Cambio-...
I see things like that all over the place. Tablets with keyboards and touchpads. After I bought a "Pure" tablet I never understood why anyone would buy another one.
Also seeing as you can usually buy these for under a hundred dollars they make great alternatives to microcontrollers like the raspberry pi.
Netbooks were a decent idea for their time, but they were not killed off by the introduction of tablets the way the author claims. As has so often been the case when potential competition appeared, blame Microsoft.
Netbooks were introduced as inexpensive, low-powered machines running lightweight Linux builds. When Microsoft noticed that people were buying them, they muscled their way in, forcing the release of netbooks with Windows XP shoe-horned on. That necessitated hardware upgrades to keep XP from looking like a total turd on the low-end hardware. The increased hardware requirements, and doubtless Microsoft license fees, drove up the price enough that the machines quickly lost their appeal. Coincidentally, that's about the time that tablets started to appear.
Something with Chromebook-class hardware running lightweight Linux would, I think, appeal to those who were originally interested in the idea of Netbooks. Something small, light and inexpensive, physically similar to a Chromebook or MacBook Air, not tied to "the cloud" the way Chromebooks are, running actual desktop software rather than less-capable tablet apps would be nice. I could see buying a couple of those.
As Steve Jobs correctly pointed out:
Netbooks really don't do anything well. In fact, they have no reason to exist.
Watch and Learn...
NewEgg has a Lenovo 110S, with Windows 10 and an 11.6 inch screen, for $169. That qualifies as a small screen at a low price.
Netbook market dropped off quickly when Microsoft signed up the manufacturers with deals they could not refuse. The results were new Netbooks with more performance CPUs, more RAM and big spinning hard disk. Oh, and I forgot.. WINDOWS WAS PRE-LOADED by default and Linux variants cost the same.
Not to mention the Netbook market stalled way before the iPad even existed.
Kids these days don't know nothing.
Look at what just happened with Apple and Samsung. They both had significant problems with their product releases because they were trying to make smartphones that were thinner and had more functionality. Apple had a case warp problem and the S8 was an incendiary device.
Consumers don't give a rat's ass about "thinner" at this point. Given a choice between a thin phone with a shorter batter life and a fatter phone with a longer use time, 99% of the public would want more talk time. But the public doesn't get that choice because Apple and Samsung are engaged in a pissing contest on design aesthetics.
If you don't think this is true, consider the market in battery packs for smart phones. Right now on Amazon there are 22,828 listings for external power for phones. People are carrying around another device just to keep their phones working.
So there is a market for a phone with a longer battery life. This is just one approach. If the smartphone manufacturers had a clue they would be competing on the real world use case of how long the phone works without needed to plug in somewhere. If there was any actual competition in the market this would happen, but effectively it's a duopoly between Samsung and Apple, at least outside of Chine. So we're stuck.
Why is Snark Required?
I carry around a laptop, mini tablet, and two phones: one Android and one Apple. I'd like to get a second tablet because I could make use of an app that only runs on IOS tablets.
"so I was able to move over the 8GiB of RAM from the dead "
Atom CPU is limited to 2 GB of DRAM.
Heard of a private cloud? My real desktop is there, available from anywhere with a network connection. Been using this for the last 6+ yrs. Can't imagine ever being stuck on a single, laptop, again. Too limiting. Too slow. Even the fastest laptops can't compare to the processing and RAM on my headless Xeon servers - BTW, they were about $600 each thanks to some used $90 Xeon CPUs.
Tried a Nokia N800 first - pre-smartphone. It was good for the time. Needed an external keyboard to reply to emails. Loved the Debian distro is ran, but battery life sucked. Added an external GPS to finish off the travel needs. Did about 50K miles with it 1 year - central, south america and Japan, China, Korea. Mainly used offline maps and skype.
Tried a trip through Europe using a 10inch Android tablet with keyboard. It wasn't quite enough OS. About half the time, no wifi was available back then and only wired ethernet was provided in hotels. Many hotels had ugly firewalls and filtering that I couldn't get passed on Android. My remote access needs couldn't be met with Android - and they still cannot. I use NX and ssh. Tried running a Linux desktop inside a chroot - almost worked, but it sucked for my needs.
I still use this tablet to control my Kodi machines and to read ebooks. It is excellent at those things and I will always have a tablet to read books - always.
Moved to an Asus Eee. Resolution and CPU sucked. It was small and better than traveling 75K miles with a 15in 6lb laptop. After about 5 yrs of use, my frustration with the 600p resolution and lack of HiDef video support pushed me to a newer device. It did work great with NX and ssh, so I was convinced.
Moved to a Acer C720 with slightly better 768p resolution and hidef video capabilities. CPU was fine, actually EXTREMELY great, the VT-x support rocked. I could run VMs in it. I became addicted to the complete access it provided to my servers via ssh or NX. The low resolution did bother me.
Moved to a Toshiba Chromebook C35. LOVE IT! This chromebook (just the hardware) is great! It is under 2 lbs, 1080p, 13inch screen, 11+ hrs of battery and a comfortable keyboard. It has a Core i3 CPU and plenty of RAM. Running 3+ VMs at a time isn't an issue. Remote access into my other systems/servers is a joy. It has become my primary desktop. When I need more performance, I'm an ssh session away from a Xeon server or 3.
Did I mention less than 2 lbs? That is my new weight requirement.
If the device fails, I can pick up a $99 chromebook, load up crouton in about 30 min and have complete access to my private cloud systems. Still have the C720 which I use for travel to nasty parts of the world. I'm completely willing to leave it behind, if needed. It doesn't have any data on it. That's part of our IT border security processes. Whenever getting on an airplane, take a wiped machine rather than your normal laptop.
Plus I don't have to deal with Apple's complete crap forced external port upgrades. Apple has been on my AVOID list for a while now.
Netbooks were small, weak Windows laptops costing a couple hundred dollars. That market is very healthy, although it partly moved to 2-in-1's. You can find lots of such products on Chinese stores like Gear Best.
This, on the other hand, is a palmtop. These were small PDA's (remember those) with keyboards. The Psion Series 5MX was one of the best, but there were several Windows CE ones.
This will certainly have an appeal for those (like me) who remember the 5MX fondly, so thanks for posting about it, even with the completely misleading title. I feel that there's less need for palmtops today, given netbooks and keyboard cases for tablets, but I did a lot of story editing on the 5MX, and I'm sure that some people would still find use for a small 400g device with a decent keyboard over the alternatives.
Really they are gone for good reasons! Under Powers's junk. We should look at getting affordable and repairable/upgradeable MacBooks as Microsoft is killing the PC with their plan for windows. 7 was the last version with using and only if you did not install the telemetry update.
But these days, cheap notebooks are around the price point that Netbooks were at. You can get a cheapass notebook for around $300ish. It won't be very good, but it'll work and be better than what a Netbook was and that was around what they cost.
All a "netbook" ever really meant was "very small, very cheap laptop." I guess if the "very small" part appealed to you then the current crop might not do it, but you can get cheap laptops.
My parents both have cheap Dells. Not the absolute bottom of the barrel, but under $400 in both cases. They aren't great, they aren't fast, but know what? They do the trick for them.
Give it a miss then, Indiegogo only exists to host crowdfunding scams so dodgy that even Kickstarter won't touch them.
Hint: Google Retro Computers (who had their crowdfunding campaign halted the other week). Yet more excuses for failed delivery this week, taking every opportunity to pass the blame onto 2 guys who did have morals and stood down when they saw where things were heading.
For the price of these netbooks, you can get a lot more.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Productivity tool? I personally would not put anything more than games and basic communication on an object I carry out in public. You forget it somewhere and poof! all your productivity or any personal stuff is gone. But that's just me.
I bought one because it was ickle. It's about the size of a textbook and it fits in a manpurse that I can wear under my coat perfectly. At the time I bought it I was on a lot of site visits & courses and for quickly banging out a spreadsheet it was more than adequate,
Now it has less than a tenth the power of my laptop, but that bastard needs a flatbed to move any substantial distance.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I know tablets with detachable keyboards exist, and there are also 3rd party keyboards.
But they all run arsewank operating systems.
My Eee 1000 boots into Kali when I want to & Win7 when I have to.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
You can already buy a netbook equivalent for $350. In fact, I've been consistently using my Kindle HDX with the keyboard cover for the past 4 years.
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
Horrible idea. Netbooks were great, but terribly underpowered, so coupled with the propensity of Windows today to degrade slowly towards the unusable, this would just sell tons of "Netbooks" that either need OS refreshes once a month or just collect dust. I cannot Imagine the Netbooks out there running the 100% disk utilization that is becoming a giant issue with systems today. To create a "good, usable" netbook, the components would need to be such that the cost would rival a regular notebook or Laptop. People want systems that can do, in the words of Microsoft, "Real Work". The small screens, slow processors and poor battery life, would make Netbooks a complete waste of money.
"Speech to text" as and argument against using a keyboard? Are you insane?
I still use my Asus EEE PC. Most of the time it is a glorified mp3 player for my workshop that I don't have to worry about charging. It also runs the controlling software for my cnc. When my PC psu died I used it as my primary PC until I got the new machine together. It actually ran my CAD software (Vectric VCarve Pro) just fine, other than a long initial loading time. It has outlasted every other piece of hardware I had at the time I bought it. Ironic because I bought it since it was cheap enough I didn't care about it living in the dusty environment of my shop.
hp still makes a netbook with there stream series. acer still makes the cloud book basically a renamed netbook. lots of china makers still make them, not to mention all those x86 windows tablets. netbooks never died off the fad simply ended and android tablets/phones took many of the roles it did but did it better so you just dont see the market flooded with them anymore.
Why in the name of all that is holy would anyone want to bring back netbooks? Any type of portable device available these days would be a better option.
They just became the 11-12" 'Cloudbook' formfactor intended for web browsing with essentially no space for on-device apps.
Honestly the only things needed to 'bring back' the netbook is slotted ram and M.2 or a similiar formfactor for storage, or just a properly inset SD card slot so you run an 8-200gig SD card, until the 2TB ones reach consumer hands in the next year or two.
A far bigger problem than finding 'Netbook' devices is finding ones that don't including ME/PSP/Secureboot for people who want to run trustworthy libre devices. Outside of a limited set of Chromebook models none of them can be stripped down enough to make integrated wifi/full stack branded hardware trustworthy.
It would be really nice to have some budget pocket sized device 6" that Ran normal linux, even if in a limited fashion. People would soon improve it
I see your viewpoint, but some of us work in coffee shops and libraries to avoid the noise and distraction at home.
My sympathies..
Let's face it: the 7-inch and 9-inch displays in the early netbooks were too small, full stop. The small keyboards were somewhat difficult to use even after acclimating to the smaller layout. I have the original Sylvania G netbook which is just an Everex Cloudbook with the touchpad moved to a less stupid location; it is quite hard to type on that thing due to the key size and the 800x480 7-inch screen isn't exactly a spacious work area. (It also had a VIA C7-M 1.2 GHz, a chip notorious for being quite weak when compared to the Intel Atom N230 that went into the first Eee PCs and Acer Aspire Ones, plus a memory limit of 1GB and a 1.8" parallel hard drive. Even with a KingSpec ZIF SSD and an XP install aligned to sector 64 instead of 63 to work with the flash memory better, it struggles hard to even start Firefox...plus it won't boot Windows 7 or later with the default partition layout due to a super inexplicable BIOS bug.)
The 11.6-inch "netbook" of today is the perfect size. The keyboard keys are full-size. The touchpad can be reasonably large. There can be more USB ports. RAM and hard drive upgrades are often possible unless it's one of the Chromebook-based ones with soldered RAM and a 32GB eMMC SSD. The screens are nice and big and always have a minimum resolution width of 1024 pixels, a number which some websites don't even work on without a horizontal scroll bar but which is far better than the 800-pixel screens of the bad old days. They're always thin and light and disposably cheap.
No one in their right mind wants 7-inch netbooks back. Even 9-inch models have squished keyboards and myopia-inducing screens. The 11.6-inch netbook, despite not carrying that label in the marketing literature, is what the market has settled on...and with good reasons for doing so. I can only see a tiny niche market for uncomfortably small netbooks. Let the old tiny netbook remain peacefully in its grave.
Microsoft killed the Netbook. Tablets and phablets came around after the netbook was already dead. I still have my eepc netbook, running Lubuntu. When I use it, people come up and are fascinated, and want to know where they can buy one. But they can't.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Or do you really think people are going to bother toting around netbooks instead of phones and tablets?
I do. I carry a phone on a pay-as-you-go plan without a data plan and pay per year what many pay per month. I also carry a now seven-year-old Dell netbook because it works fine for my hobby programming projects while I ride the city bus to and from my day job. On a netbook, I can open two 80-column windows side by side, viewing my source code in one and the output in the other. A tablet, by contrast, tends toward a window management policy of all maximized all the time because of its smartphone-derived GUI. On a netbook, I can run the occasional Windows application in Wine, such as the debugging version of the FCEUX emulator, with acceptable performance. A tablet, by contrast, is more likely to have an ARM CPU that's incompatible with the x86 instruction set for which Win32 applications are compiled, and I imagine the unsupported method of using Wine with QEMU would produce unacceptable performance due to emulation overhead.
Netbooks started out cheap because they ran (stripped down) Linux distros that could run on the minimal hardware. Well, Chromebooks do that today - with fewer compromises in performance (for what they can do). And you can load a full Linux distro on them, so the hackers that loved netbooks are also satisfied.
The problem with a Chromebook is that it's too eager to wipe itself once you put it into developer mode. Anybody who turns on your developer-mode Chromebook is prompted to press Space then Enter to erase everything and reenable OS verification.
11.6 inch isn't "small" to people who prefer 10.1 inch for ease of carrying.
Some of us take care of hundreds of sites where we may have to locally console into devices to work with them. Or we may have to attend conferences or meetings with the organizations that we work with. Or we may have to be on-call.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
I would have thought that some sort of low-end android tablet or phone with a keyboard case of some kind would make this proposed product redundant.
Not unless it's an Android/x86 tablet or phone. One of the advantages of a GNU/Linux netbook used to be that one could run Wine for the occasional Windows app that doesn't demand performance more than what you'd get out of, say, a Pentium 4. (An Atom from the netbook era had instructions per clock roughly comparable to a P4.)
No, you pointed out the actuality of it: putting a keyboard on a tablet still leaves you with a crappy device that's inferior to a notebook for anything resembling productivity. 1024x600 on a 10" screen might not be wonderful to work with, but at least you stood a chance of using real applications on a netbook, not the primarily consumption-oriented apps you find on mobile devices today.
Today's netbook would probably be ~11"-13" 1366x768, 2GB (upgradable to at least 4GB), 64GB SSD or even a small HDD (user upgradable) and a low-end processor for under $300, something that would run a lightweight Linux distro without straining. I know you can get stick-housed computers with 2GB/32GB running Win10 with Bling! for around $200, so adding a low-end screen and keyboard in a notebook form shouldn't add that much to it.
Exactly. Whoever argues that speech-to-text is usable, let alone good, has been watching way too much Star Trek TNG. That takes place in the 24th century, so even if it were real, it's a long way off.
A tablet running a smartphone-derived operating system runs smartphone applications. A netbook ran desktop applications. If a desktop application is available for a particular task, but an application for a smartphone-derived operating system is not, it's quicker to run an existing desktop application to perform that task than to write a smartphone application from scratch and then perform the same task.
No laptop user would choose it unless they very literally can't afford anything better
The only "serious" (i.e. non-Atom) 10 inch laptops that I'm aware of are Panasonic's expensive "Let's Note" laptops sold only in the Japanese market. Prices start at $1,200, and I wouldn't be able to buy one with a warranty anyway because I live in the United States, not Japan.
Besides, aren't Chromebooks the current day netbooks?
Not as long as destruction of your Crouton installation is as easy as following the prompts to press Space Enter.
Aren't "Ultrabooks" the Netbooks we all really wanted? We have 12-13" laptops now that probably have less volume than the 9-12" Netbooks they replaced.
_nfotxn
For sure I can. And I can be on topic. But I still get modded like you so fuck you.
And a netbook is a dece3nt productivity tool? wtf? both are serious compromises when it comes to productivity.
must be sooo hard to carry a decent productivity tool like a real laptop that weighs all of about 1kg. Really if you are working in a coffee shop you aren't likely to be a particularly productive person in the first place and even less so if your idea of a productivity tool is a netbook. I loved my netbook but the moment laptops became powerful and light it went on ebay and was replaced with a real productivity tool and a media consumption tablet. This is also why they stopped making them, their are very few people that want them and those that do seem very confused as to their usefulness.
They invented this thing called a laptop, more productive, faster, more convenient and nowadays incredibly light and easy to carry around without all the shortcomings of a netbook. The days of needing a netbook are over, phones and tablets fill in the social and fun factors while light laptops fill the productivity gap. Their may be some tiny fringe cases where netbooks make sense but I can't think of any and the reason they don't sell them anymore is even for those cases there just aren't enough people to sell them too.
I have a netbook, an Acer Aspire One from about 5 years ago. 1GB RAM, 250 GB HD (not SSD), atom N550. Hardly up spec. 10.1" screen. It runs Debian. It runs LibreOffice, gnumeric, LaTeX, and not too sluggishly (okay, LibreOffice takes a little while to start up, but then it's fine). I can prototype code, write papers, all that actual work stuff. The non-flexible keyboard means I can use it in my lap, I don't need a table or anything. I can type on it damn near as fast as on a full size keyboard. It fits in a backpack or briefcase along with all my other stuff (does not need its own bag) and it's a real computer. One of my best value-for-money IT purchases ever.
You forgot: much larger, so forget carrying it one-handed or using it on the train or in the plane or fitting it in the carry-on luggage. It also won't have the connector they need, since they for some reason needed it to be so thin that even if they wanted to they couldn't fit ethernet or VGA.
Useless.
What I want :
1. Integrated REAL keyboard - no virtual kbd, no separate bluetooth crap that I must manage its separate battery charge status, can STAND BY ITSELF and GUARANTEED TO STAY IN ONE PIECE on irregular,vibrating surface like bag on my lap on subway so no separate keyboard with kickstand or magnet connected like MS surface/current netbooks
2. Lightweight for mobile gaming - can be used continually with two hand grip(like nintendo DS) or one hand grip(like smartphone). In my experience the upper weight limit is somewhere around 400g~500g
3. NO castrated storage - cpuwise Atom is OK you can even use OLD generation low power Atom like Z530(2W)+yucky imagination GMA500 GPU to run dosbox/SNES emulator/2d games rather well. Current Atom(after bay-trail) with REAL INTEL GPU can even run lightweight 3d games well if you set the preferences low. All the slowness comes from its slooooow eMMC raw flash(no parallel tricks like SSD) storage especially it's write speed is painfully slow.
4. adequate memory - minimum 2GB
5. good battery capacity - minimum 10 hours for light use/3 hours for heavy(gaming) use.
6. OS freedom just like PC - install & use linux just like pc without problem. android? I'll install android myself if necessary.
7. NO castrated USB(like having only 1 micro usb that also used for charging - huge headache for charging&attaching external devices simultaneously)
8. REAL connector to external display device - NO MIRACAST CRAP
For now I have one that satisfy 1,2,7,8(now discontinued UMID mbook SE) I hope to find one that satisfy all my requirements(plus more)
I am fed up with the design of mobile devices (less than 1 Kg) useful only for social-bullsh!t.
I need a way to connect to my servers and network equipment by CLI on a reasonable screen.
Touch keyboard eat 50% of a landscape screen.
Bluetooth keyboard are nice, but need an extra charger.
Netbooks are great tools, but you need to find one: it's an endangered species.
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
All of that software you listed runs great on a Surface Pro 4, aka "a tablet", aka "fondleslab."
Probably not what you're thinking of though since the price on that plus keyboard is $1,200+
Bring in a new Asus EeePC or Acer Aspire One, with upgraded specs (touch screen, 64 bit CPU) and we can start to talk. This Gemini thing could be a nice mobile case, but not a netbook.
Picked up a Samsung Chromebook 3 at Walmart for around 90$. Cheap. Super duper cheap.
It has a paltry 32gb internal storage, but I dont use it. Instead, I installed crouton, and set up a chroot on a big microSD card. By default, crouton wants to use a very old revision of ubuntu. (Trusty, I think...) It has no problems setting up a Xenial or newer one though. It just complains at you something terrible when you tell it to install anything other than trusty, and after that shuts the hell up and works as expected.
Regardless, this is an Intel based chromebook, so the chroot can drive WINE like a champ.
It is a 1.6ghz dual core Intel system with 2gb of RAM, with ZRAM enabled. Has wifi, bluetooth, HDMI out, and the like.
No physical HDD, so dropping isn't an issue. The CPU is actually a 2ghz chip that is downthrottled for heat dissipation reasons, so it has no fan inside. Internal battery lasts 8 hours in active use.
It weighs less than a pound.
It works just fine for me as a netbook. I can run some limited office productivity software on it (Office works in WINE if you know what you are doing-- and OpenOffice works native, due to linux) I have a choice of browser, I can multitask, and do local saving. Works great. Just a little inconvenient, because I have to start the chroot every boot. (there ARE ways to make it boot automatically when chrome starts, but meh.)
Really, if it werent for the chromebooks using some bizzarro ACPI based keyboard and sound hardware that normal Linux does not know how to handle, it would be the go-to hardware for linux chromebooks to turn them into inexpensive netbooks.
We don't need no netbook. We need small - the size of a smartphone - wired (no bluetooth bullshit) keyboard. Then you hook it to your smartphone and have all the benefits w/o any drawbacks. For bonus points, I'd take a very small usb-hub and add a mouse.
Even if speech to text were perfect, it is only a solution when you're in a room by yourself, so becomes less feasible once you leave your parents' basement.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Even in god damn star trek they still had touch keyboards.
This sounds like way too much bullshit than to just buy a 2009 netbook for $100. You've wasted more time/money fucking around with that novelty toy than anything practical, or spending more for something better.
I have an Acer Aspire netbook w/ Win7 Starter Edition. (I would have upgraded it to Win10 except there's no 64 bit driver for the Intel GPU and I couldn't figure out how to install 32bit Win10.) It's biggest limitation is the Win7 SE 2 GB memory limit - so I replaced the HDD with a SDD.
What I love about it is it's portability - the 10" screen makes it about the same size as a tablet, but with a normal keyboard. It also has a decent selection of ports (USB, VGA, HDMI, SD card) and the 100GB SDD means I've got a decent amount of space for photos etc. (Used it to back up camera cards on a recent trip.)
For a while, it was my only computer and it's amazing what you can get done on it.
you can use any keyboard via the mini usb connector.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Have you actually tried it recently? Oh, of course not. I just used it to text one of my sisters because it's quicker than using the on-screen keyboard, and I'm having left-over home-made spareribs for breakfast before heading out into the -18 cold.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
You obviously haven't tried it. It works even with the talking heads on TV yakking away on the news. It's easier than using the on-screen keyboard and gets rid of some of those auto-correct errors. Bunch of luddites, it's not 2010 any more.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Perhaps the summary should have also included a link to the GPD Pocket; same internals as a Surface 3, active cooling, ~7.8" touchscreen, etc.
There is still a demand for this form factor.
Spec wise it has an old Atom (overclocked to 2GHz), a 11.6" screen and a Nvidia ION, HDMI output, can decode H264 in hardware without problem, has 3GB of RAM, ethernet, wifi abgn, bluetooth, 3 USB, etc.
I run Mint 17.3 Xfce on it, it works well, I still use it to debug some code in car application written on AVR ATMEGA, it can compile a 32K project in a few seconds, transfer it via USBasp, serial console via a CP2102, etc. I am using it mainly for this as my other laptop is 17" and too big.
The bottleneck is the CPU so browsing some big sites like facebook or reddit+res it is slow. I also installed Win10 on a partition to try it, it works fine!
You can buy one for ~$70 on eBay. To replace it I would need a $300 chromebook and manage to install linux on it, but would miss some keys maybe?
"Science will win because it works." - Stephen Hawking
Listen graybeard, shut up.
"Surface Pro 4"
Until wifi dies. Or the Surface wont turn on. Or the touch screen wont work.
We issued Pro 4s to our sales staff. I'm not joking -- literally 10% were dead on arrival. About half of the rest experienced the above problems (mixed in with dead screens, dead USB ports and a few other things) within the first year. We're now 1 year out from issuing them and about 6 months out from no longer replacing a dead/broken one with a replacement Pro. There's maybe 10 left in my region (out of about 90).
I blame PART of that on sales staff. They can be brutal on hardware sometimes. I blame most of it on the hardware which can't hand real world use.
I still have an old ASUS netbook from waybackwhen(tm). I installed ubuntu on it and use it primarily as a remote terminal when I need to go in the field. I love the fact the thing can easily fit in my glove box. That sucker has taken some abuse and still is kicking.
The fact that you think the TV going is the problem says a lot about you, but nothing about the real problem: It's really annoying to have people talking when you're trying to work, and if everyone in the office (or on the train, or wherever) is talking to their computer then everyone is going to be distracted.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
The niche isn't gone. I know a small company that used a couple asus netbooks on the sales floor to work with customers to take orders (wedding invitations). As those asus devices died they were replaced with HP Stream 11 devices which I would consider to be the modern day equivalent of what we used to call netbooks. Even with a larger screen they are lighter and have better battery life. they have limited local storage, but the customer orders are stored on a local server so no need for a lot of local storage.
The/a niche for these still exists.
Bang the enter key 5 times to activate the default buttons on dialogs, now say 'OK' five times. What is the ease of use ratio? Navigate to one field on a form that needs updating and update it with voice. Now do it with a mouse and keyboard.
It's better than an onscreen keyboard, barely.
If you can't type much faster and accurately than you can speak, you need to learn to type.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
'Michael Mrozek [...] says "I never understood why they were gone in the first place." '
Hey Michael, let me help you out with that. Screen too small, keyboard too small, CPU laughably weak, too little RAM, dinky hard drive, poor build quality. That about covers it. The netbook failed because it was an unsatisfactory computing experience all around.
And no, just because you personally think it was good enough, or you personally had a netbook that maybe addressed a couple of the above-mentioned items, that does not a viable market make. Netbooks were stinkers and you claiming they weren't, doesn't impress me in the slightest. Keep the junk off the shelves and stop disappointing consumers by selling garbage that won't satisfy. You bring all of IT down when you pull that sh*t.
Here's the indiegogo page:
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/gemini-pda-android-linux-keyboard-mobile-device-phone/#/
It is $600 and not a netbook. As the URL says, it it s a PDA (and a pretty cool looking thing at that).
If you want a netbook, here is one that you can put linux on. It is $189:
https://www.acer.com/ac/en/US/content/series/aspireonecloudbook11
It is fanless, and gets something like 8 hours under linux for me (much more than that with the screen off, but what's the point?)
The original post conflates two things: netbooks and sub-netbooks (aka pocket PCs). Netbooks never completely went away, although the name went away after it went out of fashion. The first netbook wave had 9" screens, except for the original Eee PC 700 which had a 7" screen but was as big as a 9" system - the small screen was for cost reasons and it had huge bezels. Later they grew in size a bit as technology improved and it was possible to make them in 10-12" sizes that weren't heavy or expensive. The larger size allows for both more screen real estate, a keyboard that is closer to full size and easier to type on, and a better trackpad. Current examples include the HP Stream, the ASUS X205, the Acer Aspire 11.6, and the Dell Inspiron 11.
We also have Chromebooks now. The lower end ones either have hardware similar to the low end PCs mentioned above or use an ARM processor instead. (There are also fancier Chromebooks with Intel Core CPUs and 1080p displays that cost more.) They fill many of the needs that people used to use netbooks for. It's also possible to make them more like a full capability PC by installing Linux, either alongside Chrome OS or in place of it.
Sub-netbooks did go away for a while; tablets took over their niche. (I'm talking about devices that are a true 7" size or smaller and have full keyboards. Many of them are also designed to run full desktop software.) Devices that small don't allow normal touch typing; the technique is either hunt and peck or thumbboarding. The tiny keyboard doesn't have much advantage over a touchscreen keyboard for most users and eliminating the keyboard lowers the cost and weight, so sub-netbooks died as a mass market product.
The recent crowdfunded projects are using inexpensive contract manufacturing to make tiny PCs again. They have the same CPU and display that you'd find in a small Windows tablet (sometimes without the touchscreen) and add a tiny keyboard. They aren't likely to become mass market products again, but the crowdfunded products will satisfy the small minority that prefers that kind of system.
How many people have you seen using a fullsize keyboard with a tablet (which would require at least one adapter to lose or break) on a plane or train?
You haven't even attempted to address the point of the toy OSs on these devices.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
You obviously haven't tried it. It works even with the talking heads on TV yakking away on the news. It's easier than using the on-screen keyboard and gets rid of some of those auto-correct errors. Bunch of luddites, it's not 2010 any more.
Except the real-time speech-to-text on the news involves trained operators in a sound-proof room wearing headphones repeating everything that the people in the studio are saying into an expensive commercial voice-recognition rig that has been trained to their voice.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
Anyone using a Chromebook is running Linux. It's based on Gentoo Linux these days (just open a terminal and grep through /etc)
I'm still using my EEEPC, to. It was the first model that diid not require any proprietary drivers for Linux, and, ironically, it came with Windows preinstalled. It has been running Linux since the day I bought it. I have expanded its hard drive to 1TB, and its RAM to 2GB. 2G is a bit small these days; I find web browsing is getting too heavy, mainly because of software bloat and ridiculously complicated pages
And there are a very few applications where a larger screen size would be nice and enhance usability. There are others that are just unnecessarily piggy and refuse to run usably in smaller windows. Usually these are apps in the browser. They require width wider than my screen and they also disable the horizontal scroll bar. Slobs.
But they were quaint.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
What the HELL does navigation have to do with speech to text replacing typing your messages? Oh, right - absolutely sweet fuck all. Which is easier - to type on a phone screen or to dictate your message? Hint - speech to text is quicker and more accurate.
Quit moving goalposts.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Try using it to dictate on your phone. It works. No headphones and noise-cancelling microphones, and google trains it to your voice as you use it. And they have far more cpu to throw at any single sentence than that expensive commercial rig can pump out.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.