A little over 4 years ago I bought an Asus PC701 4G Netbook. It was small, light, and did the job… well mostly. I struggled with the inability to have Outlook on a Linux based PC and I really needed Outlook. I upgraded to Windows XP and it all worked out well enough. At least for a secondary machine that is. In the end, that little SSD died and I upgraded to my next netbook – one that I actually used as my main machine for quite some time, a rebadged MSI Wind U100. This one was more sprightly running as it did an Atom processor with an (upgraded) 2GB of RAM, and an (upgraded) 160GB HDD. I could do everything on that little machine, even running Windows 7 Premium Home as soon as that came out. It is still a fine machine, if a little sluggish at times but with excellent battery life running above a real 4 hours.

Since then I have moved away from those little netbooks to my current Ultralight machines (a 13″ Asus UL30 and an 11.6″ HP DM1), but those machines owe quite a bit to those early netbooks, which in my view leads very much into today’s Ultrabooks. Netbooks identified the following very important requirements for a laptop – it had to have good to excellent battery life, be very light, have enough storage and sufficient performance. Those little Atom based machines have sufficient performance for browsing, a little wordprocessing, email and playing music – exactly what the average family need in laptops that are owned by every member of the family, and in fact what most busy business travellers also needed. All of these features have made their way into pretty much every single 11.6″ and 13″ based laptop today. Netbooks also helped greatly in the removal of the need to have an optical drive, so much so that very few actual machines these days have built in optical storage and most people don’t miss that except about twice a year, when a separate drive can be used.

Unfortunately things have moved on in the processor stakes, the memory stakes and the required workload stakes. Netbooks as they are today have not moved on except in the growth of the 11.6″ based ultra light laptop which also corrects the other main problem of netbooks – the manufacturers margins. The new “netbook” is the 11.6″ ultralight running Windows 7 Premium Home with 4GB of RAM, 320GB of HDD, a 1366×768 screen, and most importantly a dual core processor that is also ultra low power to give 5 to 6 hours of battery life for normal use.

So I do agree Netbooks have died but they begat some very interesting children. Without Netbooks we would all still be paying £600/$750 for a 14″ monster with 2 hours of battery life. Be thankful for Netbooks.