Netbook

2009 – The Year of the Netbook (Not the Year of the Smartphone or MIDs)

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Netbooks A new report by ABI Research claims that 2009 should be the break-out year for ultraportable netbooks. They believe that up to 35 million of the devices will sell this year, with those numbers climbing to over 135 million by 2013.

ABI believes that a large part of the reason for the projected growth is because netbooks are filling an important demand that Mobile Internet Devices (MIDs) and smartphones are not able to fill, as far as having a clear usage model:

“In recent years, the industry still expected the smartphones to be more than they turned out to be, and most recently, MIDs were thought to be the next big mobile devices segment, but an unclear usage model continues to confuse the market,” ABI analyst Kevin Burden said in a statement. “So today, netbooks’ time has come, and ABI Research expects them to enjoy very strong market growth.”

According to InformationWeek, the report does give credit to smartphones, saying they paved the way for netbooks, because they were able to introduce people to what was possible with mobile devices and web/internet access.

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Netbooks and Screen Resolutions

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Doug over at CrunchGear has written a commentary about the state of netbooks and display resolutions. It’s more of a plea to netbook makers, and I agree completely. We’ve reached a point where outside of a new platform (NVIDIA Ion) or new CPUs (dual-cores), there’s … Read more

Speak Up if You Want to See NVIDIA’s Ion

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If you want to see an ultraportable device using NVIDIA’s Ion platform that was demonstrated at CES, NVIDIA wants you to contact your favorite maker of notebooks or netbooks or anything in between. They want you to ask if or when your favorite PC company … Read more

Acer Aspire One D150 – This February?

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blogeee.net has some photos and information on the 10.1″ Intel Atom-powered Acer Aspire One D150. It’s being called the D150, at least in France. 3-Cell battery versions will ship in February, and March will see the larger 6-cell versions. The starting price is € 329 … Read more

Jolicloud – Cloud-Based Linux for Netbooks

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jolicloud Yesterday I mentioned Kuki Linux, an Ubuntu-based Linux distribution (or just the kernel if you prefer) centered around the 8.9″ Acer Aspire One.

Today, I’m mentioning a different Linux distribution, one that is focused on netbooks in general, and that’s designed around using the internet and cloud-based computing.

It’s called jolicloud (www.jolicloud.com), and in the word of it’s developers:

We love netbooks: they are cheap, compact, light and always connected via 3G.

What we didn’t like so much was the user experience so we decided to build our own.

We used Linux and made it boot faster and we optimized it for surf and cloud computing. We redesigned the interface and integrated some cool stuff.

This is how the jolicloud project started. The next step is to let you try it out and have your opinion so together we can build the best netbook experience.

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