The Future of Netbooks

Depending on your view, technology usually enhances either your business life or your personal life. I remember when a tiny form factor computer called the Timex-Sinclair 1000 hit the market, people said it was either a toy or a great computer for small business owners, almost exactly the same stories I heard when the TRS-80 computer appeared in Radio Shack.

In other words, no one knew exactly how or where these new general purpose tools would be used.

General purpose technology is like an unlabeled cardboard box or plastic bottle - somebody figured out how to build a great product but who really needs it? The companies that use cardboard boxes may not have a product that'll sell well in a plastic bottle or at least aren't sure if they do until they try it. In some cases, they won't - unsealed cardboard boxes don't store liquids very well and two-liter plastic bottles aren't made to store reams of paper.

The same goes for portable computing devices. I used to have a Gateway2000 subnotebook computer called the HandBook 486 (that sported a 486 DX2-50 processor - 50 MHz!). It handled Microsoft Windows 3.1 and Microsoft Office applications pretty well. I could comfortably type Word documents and review Excel documents anywhere I traveled, but didn't use it when I was seated at home or in the office - it was neither an office productivity computer nor a gaming machine (unless you like playing Solitaire). Later, I purchased an HP Jornado 720 for portable typing. In both cases, my purpose for purchasing these devices was reading offline emails and writing short stories and or novel chapters. The Handbook I had bought as a used/preowned model at Unclaimed Baggage Center and it contained a lot of financial data about a company called Saudi Aramco so it was obvious to me that the subnotebook was capable of serious business spreadsheet use on the go.

For portable computing, I have also used the Palm series of PDAs and an Archos Jukebox [loaded with the RockBox OS]. My wife occasionally uses her iPod Touch.

By now, many of you use cell phones or smartphones to accomplish your lightweight-duty office/home computer work, replacing the old days of email with texting and using mobile apps to look at files stored on your home or office PCs.

Cloud computing, after many years of fits, starts, promises and vaporware, seems to be catching on, making me wonder if netbooks are the real future of handheld computing, offering big-enough computer screens for data entry/review and limited capability for browsing and photo/video viewing.

While researching this subject, I came upon an article about the next generation of netbooks:

Netbooks of Tomorrow: Notebook, Meet the
Smartphone - CIO.com - Business Technology Leadership [Posted using ShareThis]

If predictions are correct, Apple will jump into the netbook market with a larger iPod Touch (or do they plan to just take on the gaming world of the PSP and Nintendo DS, instead?). Are we moving to the keyboardless tablet PC again? Touchscreen computing works fine if you're searching the Web or looking at photos/video but I certainly wouldn't want to type large documents or spreadsheets and rely on my fingers resting in the QWERTY keyboard typing position for long stretches of time on a flat surface. I don't like holding a Blackberry or other thumb-oriented keyboard for very long, either, even when on the go.

A smaller market existed for precloud computing devices, including UMPCs like the OQO, a product I drooled over a few years ago, thinking that a portable PC that worked as your desktop PC would be the wave of the future. News today implies that OQO has called it quits. No one wanted to pay the price of a fully-loaded desktop PC to get a miniaturized version of an average or even pretty-good desktop.

On the opposite end, the OLPC generated a lot of buzz when it was slated to be a $100 low-end portable PC for third-world countries. Now you can only donate $199 to send one to a child in a third-world country.

Meanwhile, special-purpose devices like the Amazon Kindle and the Sony e-reader carve out a niche for digital books. I remember my impression of the first e-book I read on a Palm III - I liked the pocket portability of some public domain books I loaded, including Aesop's fables and John Donne's poetry, as well as being able to search the text, but I missed being able to hold my fingers in three sections and flip quickly between them or scribbling handwritten notes in the margins.

I own another device that falls in between a portable digital audio recorder and a tablet PC, a digital pen called the livescribe pulse. The pen seems to best serve the lecture hall or office meeting environment or any place where one would want to tie audio recording to handwritten notes (journalists like it, too). I have used the pen at family functions and found it rewarding to go back and listen to family discussions again while reading what I wrote at the time. Otherwise, business colleagues of mine don't like me to make audio recordings of our meetings because it puts them on the record when sometimes they like to talk off the cuff or crack the occasional dirty joke, something they don't want to be recorded for posterity.

I am a middle-aged man who no longer desires new technology like a starving fox in a henhouse or a hungry kid in a candy store. So, for me, the netbook, no matter what form it will take, seeks a younger buyer, whose needs and desires will drive the low-cost, handheld computer market, combining some office and some personal computer use but probably not heavily leaning toward one or the other, remaining somewhat general purpose, so that the major computer manufacturers can survive on the economies of scale that allow them to eake out a slim profit margin. No one wants to be the next OQO.