Tablet-format Cellphone Netbooks — On Deck for 2009?
2008 was the year of the netbook: My local electronics store went from having none in stock to a display offering some 20 types. Thanks to Intel’s Atom processors, and Asus and the amazing Eee PC, we’ve got a whole new class of low-powered, highly portable, and relatively cheap computers.
So what will 2009’s consumer computing revolution be? Based on the announcements made so far, tablet-format cellphone netbooks.
Standard netbooks are not the most usable machines. Their keyboards are small, as are their screens, and tiny touchpads lend a measure of frustration to moving the pointer. Spurred no doubt by a high-profile modder community, Asus has announced that it’ll be coming out with a touchscreen Eee netbook early next year. And big players like Toshiba have begun to enter the market with more slickly designed netbooks of their own.