Tablets will finish off netbooks in 2011

Oh, how I wish Netbooks hadn't become 'the next big thing'....

I love having computing available everywhere I go. Really useful. I type up notes live in meetings / presentations and never have to worry about transcribing them. I take my email, my photos, my documents wherever I go. I've been known to develop code on it, in an idle period far away form home or desk.

So I started with a Palm III - cheap toy, screen far too small and the data entry far too slow. Upgraded to a Psion 5 - great, but by then the market had become a bubble and burst, and Psion quickly vanished with the remaining issues with the platform sadly unsolved. Too many people had realised that a GBP400 handheld with slow data entry wasn't all that useful, there was a glut of inventory and the devices died.

Along came netbooks - brilliant! Battery life and portability not as good as before but software compatibility better. Then they became The Next Big Thing and everyone started making them, most people discovered that a 9" laptop with no CD drive isn't very useful for them, and we've got a glut of inventory and a rapidly collapsing market.

Now we have tablets. For twice the cost of my netbook I can get an iPad which trades marginally greater portability and battery life for enormously worse data entry and more limited software. Or a range of imitators that largely serve to show that Smartphones are overpriced by having the same basic features behind a bigger screen for a lower cost. Again, I'm expecting to see a year or two's bubble where we all have to have them and everyone starts making them, followed by a market collapse and new products becoming rarer than hen's teeth.

For those of us who want real, proper mobile computing, not the latest overpriced fad gadget, can we please have less hype? That way hopefully we can end up with a long-term market for machines we can actually use and get real work done on, not just this year's shiny tech bauble.

The article's basic point: Tablets will kill netbooks because netbooks aren't tablets.

Look at some of his reasons...

- "The Major Issue with netbooks is that they lack touch screens"

- "Netbooks are boring...Tablets feature touch screens, they have mobile apps and they offer more aesthetically"

- "Apple is a major preesence in the tablet industry...[netbooks] don't have the same "innovation factor" that Apple delivers"

- "Consumers and enterprise are finding that there is value to be had in using mobile third-party apps. They might not deliver the same power that Windows Programs can but netbooks are underpowered" (I paraphrased this one for length)

In the end he never really makes the case for tablets he simply treats tablet features as inherently superior and then dings the netbook for not having them

(personally I do think netbooks are going to die but at the hands of super-thin notebooks)

Fundamentally silly. Based on the fallacy of the excluded middle, with zero quantitative data to back up assertions. At least the dot-com hockey-stick graphs started with points of established data.

Particularly dubious is extrapolating Apple's iPad success to success for that form factor when other companies have barely started shipping product.

Netbooks, like notebooks before them, may no longer be generating buzz, but that doesn't mean they're "finished off", whatever that means. The last time I checked, Apple hadn't shut down its laptop operations.

I'm waiting for a tablet that has a physical keyboard with a hinge so I can type fast, with two hands, and with an uptilted screen for readability. As soon as tablets can do that, goodbye netbook!

No. I have high hopes for Chrome netbooks. A very simple, very fast, cheap laptop? The main thing is a real keyboard for doing heavy typing. Lots of potential for this form factor.

Well, as long as the manufacturers don't crap it up as much as the telecom carriers crap up cell phones. Android is doing well anyway.

Besides, the Year of the Tablet is only beginning, and it may not be so rosy in the long run for anybody but Apple. Remember the Tablet PC was going to take off too. And then it was the Origami device (I have one of these. And then there was something "revolutionary" coming after that ... I think that next platform vanished like a mist over the moors.)

The linchpin of tablets replacing netbooks, for me and the people I talk to at least, will be the USB port (or lack thereof). Being able to connect my existing media and peripherals, the most important of which being a hardware keyboard for long typing sessions (like programming), is ultimately my deciding factor. With that and a terminal I could completely replace my netbook with a tablet.

Google's already taken that initiative with the devices we saw at CES. Hopefully Apple follows suit with the iPad 2.

I only recently got an opportunity to try using a netbook, and I like this form factor more than I would have expected. The size makes it more ergonomic than a full sized laptop, yet the keyboard is still usable.

I've never tried using a tablet computer, but I think these will suffer from ergonomic difficulties. For situations such as reading books/text or maybe browsing the web from a sofa they would probably be ok, but most web content isn't designed in such a way as to make the links/buttons large enough for a finger. On a touch screen the UI design needs to be quite different from those which are intended to be mouse-driven.

Also take a look around the various exhibitions and see how many visitors are carrying tablets with them as opposed to laptops or netbooks. That's probably a fair indication of how useful tablets actually are.

Is it just me or does the entire slide show read like the same point, "Netbooks will lose because Apple made tablets cool," twelve times over?