Not again!
We've heard this before, and it's still true that Netbooks are a saturated market. Tablets aren't
Tablets outshipped netbooks in Q2 2011. So says market watcher ABI Research, which recorded shipments of 7.3m netbooks in Q2 - down 13.1 per cent on Q1's 8.4m units - and 13.6m tablets. ABI said it reckons some 32m netbooks will ship in 2011 as a whole - 16.m of during H2. That is down 17.5 per cent on 2010's total shipments …
To mirror what was mentioned above, my late 2008 Dell Mini 9 with its 1.6GHz Atom is now approaching its 3rd birthday - has there been a doubling or tripling of the power of netbooks for the same price and form factor in those 3 years? Nope!
I went looking for an upgrade but there are only small increases in power out there (chip wise not battery capacity) which is a real shame.
Well I still love my netbook... an Asus Eee 1005HA-P.
Intel Atom 1.66GHz, 2GB memory, 10" screen at 1024x600 res, runs Win XP at brilliant speed and consistently gives me 9+ hours of battery life 3 years after purchase (I can get a whole transatlantic flight worth of work done). Only weighs 1kg which is barely noticeable in your bag, and only cost £200 (much cheaper than those ultra-portable laptops). Plus it has a full keyboard with which I am typing this.
It's not one of those super-early netbooks that had no screen, no battery and no power. I didn't ever see the point in those.
Most tablets I've seen only seem to support cut-down "mobile" operating systems and don't have the ability to install things like jedit, gimp, inkscape, libreoffice etc.
It's the ability to do everything, everywhere that makes netbooks a winner for me. The thought of having to sub-edit an article or make some emergency edits to some code using a tablet just sounds like a nightmare.
Having said that, most people are idiots when it comes to computers and probably just want app stores and shiny things that work.
But you'll have to pry my netbook from my cold hands because I have no intention of ever replacing it with a tablet.
However I would consider a tablet if you could install an OS of your choice and they were made into more rugged sealed units for use outdoors.