For the last year and a half, netbooks have been just as big a part of the personal computing scene as laptops. CES 2008 was just a few months after Asus kicked everything off with the original Eee PC and since then, we’ve seen netbooks from every company under the sun. Rather than the fuss dying down, CES 2009 was a chance for the other companies to show off what they had spent the last year striving toward, and while it’s all very impressive, we’re starting to get a little tired of ultra portable laptops.
MSI announced the Hybrid a couple of weeks back and it was a big part of the company’s booth. We wanted to hear all about the MS-9A08, a quad core box that you mount onto the back or side of a panel, which lets you leave behind the mess of a desktop computer without compromising on stuff like storage, speed or keyboard size--but the first two booth people we talked to didn’t have a clue what we were talking about. We managed to hunt it out for ourselves and eventually someone wandered over that could tell us more about it (check it out here) but there was no shortage of people to tell us about the Hyrbid and in all honesty, there wasn't all that much new to tell.
Sony launched one of the most talked about products at CES this year in the form of the Vaio P Series Lifestyle PC. Weighing in at just 1.4 lbs with an 8-inch 1600 x 768 ultra wide display, Sony didn’t pitch this as a netbook. In fact when we were at the booth, the word wasn’t used once. That said, an 8-inch notebook is netbook territory and this one is appealing to the same audience, even if it’s a little pricier--as most Sony products are.
We also saw Dell’s Mini 10 at the show. The 10 is smaller than the 12 (duh) but a lot sleeker than the 9 when it comes to design. It comes packed with integrated GPS, integrated mobile broadband, an Intel Atom Z530 processor and 802.11b/g/n. Impressive for a netbook but at the same time, we felt there was a sort of “meh” air to it. That night we were asked what we’d seen that day that we liked and we only mentioned the Mini 10 in passing.
Netbooks were never pegged to be a passing trend but we think it’s high time people accept the part they play in personal computing (and they’ve proved vital to the market) and start looking for the next big thing.
Would you get a netbook over a standard notebook? How useful do you think these ultra portables, netbooks, and the like are? Worth the money?