Communication Breakdown
Communications from the world of, er, communications. And other stuff.
Friday 11 April 2008, 12:10 PM
To netbook or not?
Here's a question for you good folks: should we adopt the term "netbook" for what we otherwise tend to refer to as "low-cost subnotebooks"?
I refer of course to things like the Asus Eee, or the MSI Wind, or the HP Mini-Note. You know, the cheap, little laptops that you'll pretty much just be using for surfing the web.
Is the term "netbook" just jargon (it was coined by Intel this February), or is it useful shorthand for what is pretty clearly a whole new market? Over to you...
PreviousComments on this post
It's just jargon. And it's not even good jargon, because you could use these devices for other things that don't require the Internet (eg, good old word processing, otherwise known as 'writing stuff'), and you could use much more expensive devices (eg, the MacBook Air) for this purpose.
'Net' does not mean 'low-cost and small'.
Who, other than the companies selling these products, calls them "low-cost subnotebooks"? I'm more likely to say "cheap little laptop", just like you did. I'm racking my brain to try to think of devices named for what you do on them. "Cameraphone", but it's not used much now that most handsets let you take photos. And "Walkman", but that's not quite it...
It makes sense for manufacturers to distinguish clearly between the different versions of products they sell or work on. But don't expect buyers to buy into it.
