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Like many peo­ple, I’ve owned and used a suc­ces­sion of lap­tops over the years – not to men­tion sell­ing them on behalf of a vari­ety of clients. Over that time the screens have got big­ger (and bet­ter) as have the hard dri­ves and per­for­mance for most tasks is com­pa­ra­ble to a desktop.

Of course the price we pay for this is that the orig­i­nal computer-on-the-move idea behind lap­tops has been largely lost from many mod­els. They are increas­ingly designed to be taken from room to room not coun­try to coun­try. Many are full-on media cen­tres able to store all your DVDs, CDs and pho­tos. Up to a point it seemed that this trend was unstoppable.

Until that is, some bright spark took a fresh look at what most peo­ple really use lap­tops for (web, mail, a bit of word pro­cess­ing etc) stripped away a lot of the extra­ne­ous bits and pieces and came up with the netbook.

Basi­cally, net­books are tiny lap­tops whose main func­tion is to get users online and allow them to do a few basic tasks. Increas­ingly using Intel’s new Atom proces­sor and often fea­tur­ing solid state dri­ves, net­books avoid the “added value” ele­ments that are nor­mally included in today’s lap­tops (but rarely used by real live people).

The poster child so far has been ASUS’s Eee PC which was launched with a 7″ screen, a 4 gig solid state drive and WiFi – and has sold hun­dreds of thou­sands of units in a pretty short space of time. But the Eee PC is not alone – there’s the Cloud­book, MSI Wind, HP’s 2133 Mini-Note PC and the Noah­pad among oth­ers with new options from the like of Dell in the offing.

Inter­est­ingly, pretty much all net­books either have Linux as their default OS or offer it as an option. And, despite the still rel­a­tively low take-up on other PCs, on the net­books it doesn’t seem to mat­ter to users. Because net­books are first and fore­most inter­net devices, as long as you can get web, mail, IM and Skype who cares? And, of course, LInux is free so it keeps the price down too.

The scary thing for those in Red­mond is: once peo­ple realise that, for what they need, Linux is absolutely fine and that they can get oodles of other appli­ca­tions absolutely free – why go back? In fact, why not install it on other lap­tops and your desk­top PCs for that matter?

Per­son­ally, I’m pretty tempted by a net­book, it’d be like a web-enabled Mole­sk­ine. But, of course, a 9″ Mac­Book Air might just prove irresistible.

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