the onda

Having been the media darlings of 2008, I can tell that netbooks are entering the phase of the media hype cycle where everyone asks just what the big deal was in the first place and wonders how they ever let themselves get carried away with pronouncing the netbook the "computer for the cloud age."

I was intrigued by the whole phenomenon enough to try two different devices (an HP 2133 and an HP 1000) but after some serious attempts at using each as my main portable device, I gave up and declared them to be nothing more than cheap laptops.

But before we get carried away, we should take a moment to consider that "just cheap laptops" is a dumb statement to make. The laptop is a transformative device that opens up whole worlds of opportunity, especially for people who don't have regular access to computers, and making it possible for someone to get that much portable computing power for $300-500 is really quite a feat. We owe a lot of the OLPC and the subsequent race between the Taiwanese manufacturers to get component and enclosure prices down. Sadly, software makers didn't jump at the chance to redefine the experience as well— with the Ubuntu Netbook Remix as the best viable experiment to date in creating netbook-specific software— but is is still early days here.

And finally, it's important to realize that to first time computer owners who aren't stepping down from 15 inch screens are Core2 Duos, there is a lot of magic in being able to call a general purpose computing device "personal."