Netbook — portable of the future?

If one looks at the notebook market in the last year, it’s been considerably different from two years ago. Those who are following the SFF market and are involved in it know that netbooks have exploded in popularity and that almost every manufacturer is tripping over their own feet to get one out. So the question is, what does the future hold for the market? Are netbooks the future, or are we going to see this “fad” die and go back to traditional portables?

Brian X. Chen is of the opinion that what we’re seeing now with netbooks is only the tip of the iceberg and that we’re going to continue to see the netbook market expand and actually parallel the notebook market. When one thinks of it in those terms, that as many netbooks will ship as notebooks, that’s a pretty significant change in market trend.

Years ago, it was all about putting out the biggest, slickest notebook (within size limitations that have today been thrown out of the window with 17″ and even 20″ “notebooks” becoming common) and throwing in everything you could think of. Of course, that meant that the price was pretty high. Meanwhile, manufacturers were making lower cost notebooks, but their focus wasn’t in that arena.

Fast forward to today and you can’t walk into any brick and mortar store and not see sub $600 notebooks everywhere. There was a considerable market shift toward low-cost, low-powered notebooks and it seems that the consumers, Americans at least, have responded.

Brina goes on to say that the state of the economy, as well as the price of netbooks, and ultimately, their portability are going to give them life well into the future and sales will only go up.

Of course, a big part of their success is the amount of power one cram into a netbook now. Just look at what you can do with a netbook — you can run Quake 3 on an Acer Aspire One netbook. Sure, it may not be the latest and greatest game, but that’s pretty impressive for an ultra-low power processor and integrated graphics.

The netbook market isn’t going away any time soon, and the almost daily announcement of new netbooks seems to support his position.

Check out Wired’s article on netbooks and the notebook market in general for more. It’s an interest read.