read the great article on Psion by Reg?
Cos if you did you would know that all the great people from Psion left a long time ago, the strange thing is Psion still own the rights to the machine and no one has offered to buy the rights to their PDA/Netbook patents/license for such a long time.
In my opinion netbook is not generic enough yet, iPod, Hoover and Tomtom is more generic nowadays than netbook, but you don't see those company's losing their rights to the name.
Netbooks just has not been popular enough to become defacto standard yet. I don't understand why it is so difficult for marketting people to just call it a laptop because at the end of the day thats what it is. There is no real difference between laptops of old and these system, with the exception that they are more smaller and don't come with an optical drive. Old laptops didn't even have the same performance of these atom systems. Sony's been building tiny laptops for ages it just was not economically viable to buy them for normal consumers then, but due to price drops and miniturisation and downspecing they become much more viable.
The real reason the so called Netbook is so popular today is not because of the branding of the word netbook to create its own division, but actually good marketting like the beach towl lady and the lower costs and the social aspect of the world to be "online" for as much as possible and also the smaller size making it more stylish. To me its more of a "Lifestyle Laptop" rather than a "Netbook".
I still hope that the Psion crew get back together and bring out a new 5mx or new netbook with an atom cpu and show how a really portable OS should work (instant on, touch screen tabbing, multitasking of the old EPOC OS). I doubt that but I will still be using my 5mx which still remarkably works well with 2 AA batteries running for an entire days usage.