Posted on 10/27/2009 9:53:03 AM PDT by TigerLikesRooster
Netbook gravy train starts to slow as euphoria fades
Netbook shipments have started cooling after witnessing an explosive surge since late last year as customers started realizing its limits and looking for portable and affordable alternatives for full-size laptops.
According to Xia Li, vice-president of Lenovo Group, growth in netbook sales during the second half of this year has slowed as consumers have started becoming more rational in their purchases.
"Netbook sales surged in the past as consumers bought the product as gifts or as first laptops," he said. But with consumers starting to realize the limits of the products, the growth has started to slow, Xia said.
He expected the growth would decline back to the industry average of accounting for 20 percent of the overall PC market in China.
Designed to perform basic tasks like word processing, netbooks have received a good response from consumers all over the world. Ever since Taiwanese firm Asus launched its first netbook Eee PC in 2007, the product has became the market engine of the world's PC industry that was severely impacted by the economic slowdown.
(Excerpt) Read more at chinadaily.com.cn ...
Ping!
I imagine there’d be headaches looking at such a screen.
A netbook is a good second computer for taking on the road, but the small screen and keyboard would be a pain (literally) if it was your main machine.
The things have their limit. They are great entry laptops, for kids, and good for mobility when you don’t have the space or the strength to handle larger notebooks but overall that is where their usefulness stops.
In the end they will fill a niche and not much more.
Plus and minus’s
Plus: 9 hrs battery life, WinXP, runs any application you would normally run on a laptop. Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, USB and ethernet ports.
Minus: No DVD/Cd drive, only 10.1 inch screen; Atom processor is not suffient for game play. Need external DVD player to watch DVD movies.
Perfectly adequate for doing homework, business work on a small unit that travels very well. Or, use your home PC to do the work, load it on the Netbook and take that on the road.
Love’em.
I think the standard smart phone renders the netbook pretty pointless. And if laptops are your thing it seems much better to shell out a little more and get a machine with a bigger screen and some decent power.
I think the slow is because it filled an empy niche. Once the niche was filled, like a flooded ditch, the sales rate slowed to match replacement/upgrade levels.
My wife just got one. 7 hours of battery life, a screen big enough to surf, a keyboard big enough to type 90%normal speed and small enough to fit in a cargo pocket. What is not to like?
Lots of other upside - Linux screams, basic apps are free, and Win7/64 makes Vista look glacial. Next upgrade is going to be a solid-state HD. They're coming down.
Bottom line - it's a low-powered machine that sacrifices processor speed for portability and long battery life. Seems like a good compromise to me - YMMV.
We have all three, iphones, fullsize laptops and a netbook. Sometimes you want a different form factor.
I’ve got two in the house. I bought a 9” Asus and I couldn’t type! I spent half my time hitting the backspace button. I bought an Acer aspire 10.1” and it’s great.
I just watched Woot.com sell off a bunch of Aspire One’s just like mine for $224.95 shipped.
The advantage to these is that they are great for internet browsing, portability, and great battery life. Not a replacement for a “real” laptop or computer. I have different missions for each, and they are both great for their respective missions.
I don’t get headaches from reading these small screens and I need reading glasses to read written type. I don’t need them for the netbooks.
I have a netbook and a regular 15” laptop. I use the netbook for travel. It provides all I need without sore arms.
My wife got one for work because she liked that it would fit into a purse. Now I never see her using it. :)
I got a 17” laptop for work. I use it every day.
We’ve been testing a demo netbook from AT&T for a few weeks. Not a laptop substitute, but good for occasional remote service calls for after-hours support personnel. Makes a fine Citrix terminal for remote support too.
Some of my colleagues find they've gotten used to the smaller keyboards on the 9" notebooks but I found it difficult so I opted for a slightly bigger platform. Again, YMMV.
They will continue to drag the cost of laptops down and down and down as people demand the same functionality if a slightly larger package for a similar price. Like the clones, these things blew out the pretenses that were propping up the prices on entry level laptops.
I love them, most come with graphics cards that support an extra monitor. For those that don’t know dual monitor mode is very effective. You can work on both screens separately and move the mouse from screen to screen. Net books are the way to go for most uses.
“Sometimes you want a different form factor”
Ha, aint that the truth.
I love the iphone between that and google docs I never have to bring a laptop with me, even when I travel. We also use a mac book, I’m a bit less enthused about that product. Mostly though I stick with a PC that runs ubuntu.
People have figured out that the Atom chip is very limited and is in fact a bottleneck for many applications beyond the basics. Personally, I’m waiting for the new Pine Trail chip from Intel.
Is is a good machine to send your college student off with so they were bought before school started and now simply slowed.
They are nice machines for the price.
Netbooks are wonderful to use to take it on the road for email or websurfing. Even nice around the house to lounge on the couch with while watching TV. Most laptops feel more like desktops. Certainly for gaming or some application where a bigger screen size is desirable, use something else. But for most people, 90% of their activity is websurfing.
The net book stuff was nothing more than a sells gimmick, many of those that bought them did so to keep up with the Jones. Lots of the hardly used turn up on ebay.
My husband got one on a whim at the same time he bought a cheap laptop to replace a 5 year old one that was crashing on him. He liked the little one so well, especially for traveling, that it was a couple of months before he opened the box of the full size lap top. Months later he discovered that there was a 9 hour battery model, gave the old one to me, and got the 9 hour one. When we have traveled places where we will be on the go, these little computers are great. For example, we were in England last spring. The intercity trains had free wifi available. We could hop on the train and Freep as we traveled! We were also able to Skype with my daughter instead of paying expensive cell phone rates. Two fit easily in the space of one laptop in my husband’s computer case. I can also carry it around in my purse if I need to. The screen is smaller, so that can be an issue at times. We bought an external CD drive for software installations.
A netbook is a good second computer for taking on the road, but the small screen and keyboard would be a pain (literally) if it was your main machine.
I tend to think that my choice to have a powerful laptop for the main computer is needless, since the netbook is the only one that goes anywhere.
thanks, bfl
I’m thinking about getting a netbook. I’ve downloaded a lot of public domain pdfs to my desk top, then transferred them to my lap top for “lying on the sofa” reading. The big keyboard makes the laptop a bit of a pain, but the page up/page down loading is so much faster than what I’ve seen on e readers, plus the largest e reader screen I’ve seen is still an inch smaller than the net book screen(kindle DX, and it’s more expensive than a netbook too). I’d need a kindle or nook for downloading purchased books, but my preferred reading at the moment is 18th and 19th century mythology and folklore-there are hundreds of free pdfs available online from various sites. Kindle and Nook *can* handle pdfs, but it takes downloading a program for kindle, looks like Nook is set up already via B&N’s free titles. Anyhoo, getting a netbook just for pdfs seemed a good alternative to an e reader, and less of a PITA than a full sized laptop. Has anyone else used a netbook this way, and how’s it working out?
Yep.
I use my HP DV6000 with Ubuntu at home, but take the Acer when I go out the door.
I have converted the netbook to an ultraportable by putting Ubuntu on it. It can do just about anything that my HP can do, except burn DVDs.
Performance is a tick slower, but being able to carry a laptop without anyone knowing you’re carrying a laptop is nice.
The first Netbooks were built on the theory that everything you needed was in the internet “cloud” so all you needed was taday’s version of a portable dumb terminal. So they had solid state storage and often used same flavor of Linux as OS.
Then people wanted a mini notebook so we saw XP, hard drives etc appear.
I bought a refurb Acer Aspire-1 for under $200 and it’s great on the road, full XP and 120GB hard drive; with a nine cell battery it’ll go seven hours or so, and it’s small and light weight, only 9” screen but it’s very sharp and bright.
bump
I miss my high bandwidth desktop machines with fast data buses, fast video and large memory. A netbook will get support my needs in a meager fashion, but wastes much time with the device totally saturated with CPU and disk traffic. There is simply insufficient processing margin for doing real work.
They’re kind of neat for surfing on the road; getting web mail, things like that. You won’t be editing videos or running CAD software.
My biggest complaint was lack of a DVD or CD reader so you have to hook it up to your network and share a drive to install apps. Still, pretty cool for what it is now that I’m stuck supporting my wife’s.
My service runs about $70. a month. That includes a limited voice, unlimited data and no particular plan for sms or mms. With unlimited data sms and mms are not that important at all. I figured that was pretty cheap to have a cell phone and just about any of the capabilities I’d want from a netbook (writing stories for my website, listening to music and podcasts, streaming audio, youtube, keeping up with Free Republic, Sirius, email, web browsing etc). Its a good fit for me . . . of course I shouldn’t paint with such a broad brush and say it is a good fit for everyone.
PS- Can you run voip over your netbook? Now that could be a real game changer.
I don’t know about voip- I’m not sure how well it would handle it. Your plan doesn’t sound bad at all. Something comparable here would have been $15 to $25 more. A couple months after I went with the local provider my company started paying my mobile plan so I was suddenly down to $20 a month total. One of the drawbacks is that it is only 1Mbps so video is not good. I’d still like to small form factor of a phone for audio streaming but I think I’d tend to do more surfing and iTunes with my netbook.
Keyboards are too small, otherwise I’d have had one a couple of years ago when you first pointed out that Asus EEE or whatever it was called. :’)
The EEE PC 700 (7" screen -- unnngh) is crazy small, with a keyboard to match, but I found that it travels well.
Just don't try to compose the next Great American Novel on it.
For such a tiny laptop, this thing really latches onto an 802.11x wireless signal.
Let's add this new smartphone into the (becoming very confusing mix):
Droid smartphone unveiled by Motorola, Verizon
Another way to browse the internet.....
I have an older model Android phone. My screen is a little smaller and I don’t have a physical keyboard but I can surf and post with it pretty easily.
That phone looks great but I’m not sure how well it would fit in my jeans.
Some designer will soon have jeans with bigger pockets...available.
Are those the jeans that hang down your butt? I’ll just have to make do with a smaller phone.
LOL.
Ah, the Sidekick. :’) Since MS took a big dump all over Sidekick user data a couple weeks back, there could be some decent crossover market. :’)
A netbook and a bluetooth serial adapter are the ticket for working on routers and switches in a crowded wiring closet.
I like the way the Lenovo doesn’t have that shelf below the keyboard, but that screen is analogous to the LCD screen Apple intro’d for the IIc (it can be seen, probably for the only time on full-motion video, in the movie 2010), full width but not tall enough. One would probably get used to it of course.
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