Some people are wondering if we will see the Netbook format disappear from store shelves this year.
I can still see a future for Netbooks for 2 reasons though:
First some people (like my wife) are very uncomfortable surfing the web on a touchscreen device. We've got a nice tablet but she always uses her Netbook to surf. don't forget that most of the web is designed for a mouse (or trackpad) and keyboard and that browsing some sites can feel very uncomfortable on a tablet. Browsing and contributing to forums for example is not a very pleasant experience on a tablet.
Second ARM based tablets won't support flash in the future (starting with android 4.1). Now for the casual gamer this is a showstopper as 99% of successful casual games (think Zynga products like Caslteville) are written in flash, even the new releases. Yes, it could change with HTML 5, but with all the standardization issues between the browser and the needed re-skilling of developers it will probably take at least 5 years before every major casual game is written in HTML 5 and flash is phased out.
For the Netbooks to disappear we would need to have intel based tablets running Windows and flash sold at sub $300 prices with an optional keyboard and trackpad included in that price. But then that would just be a netbook with a touchscreen and removable keyboard...
I can still see a future for Netbooks for 2 reasons though:
First some people (like my wife) are very uncomfortable surfing the web on a touchscreen device. We've got a nice tablet but she always uses her Netbook to surf. don't forget that most of the web is designed for a mouse (or trackpad) and keyboard and that browsing some sites can feel very uncomfortable on a tablet. Browsing and contributing to forums for example is not a very pleasant experience on a tablet.
Second ARM based tablets won't support flash in the future (starting with android 4.1). Now for the casual gamer this is a showstopper as 99% of successful casual games (think Zynga products like Caslteville) are written in flash, even the new releases. Yes, it could change with HTML 5, but with all the standardization issues between the browser and the needed re-skilling of developers it will probably take at least 5 years before every major casual game is written in HTML 5 and flash is phased out.
For the Netbooks to disappear we would need to have intel based tablets running Windows and flash sold at sub $300 prices with an optional keyboard and trackpad included in that price. But then that would just be a netbook with a touchscreen and removable keyboard...
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