netbooks

This post was updated at 12:30 p.m. PT to reflect Dell's announcement of partnering with Vodafone.

A year after the Asus Eee PC began aggressively marking territory in the low-cost notebook business, the second-biggest PC maker in the world is finally ready with an answer.

The Dell Inspiron Mini 9 will be formally announced Thursday, as CNET News reported Tuesday. It's Dell's first foray into the Netbook category--undersize notebooks powered by Intel's Atom processor.

Hewlett-Packard, Acer, and seemingly hundreds of lower-tier players jumped in months ago to what has been certainly the most interesting development in the PC business in some time. But is it too late for Dell to make a meaningful impact in the category? Furthermore, is it even necessary for Dell to participate?

Whether this category has much potential for significant growth depends on who you ask. Gartner is predicting 5.2 million Netbooks will sell this year, but reach 50 million in 2012. Rival firm IDC has a vastly different view: 3.5 million this year, 5 million next year, and 9.2 million by 2012.

The category can be confusing for the average PC user. A Netbook is essentially a notebook form factor shrunk down, but these devices don't act as the average PC user would expect. It has a smaller screen, smaller keyboard, lower storage capacity, among other things.

That's why Dell is taking pains to reframe consumers' expectations of this type of device, and is throwing in a few different options.

"We didn't build a small PC, we built an ultramobile device," said John Thode, vice president of small-screen consumer devices for Dell. "It does a lot of PC functions, but its intent was not to emulate a PC in every aspect."

Managing the expectations consumers have of a device in this category is a good idea, but it doesn't change the fact that it falls into the category of a Netbook. (CNET Reviews like what the Mini 9 offers as a Netbook, and for a full rundown of the specs, plus a hands-on review, see here.)

Price is the other reason for the reframing.… Read more

Updated at 5:54 p.m. PDT to clarify that the "Commodore" in the Commodore UMMD 8010/F is most likely only an homage to the company of yore.

Gadget watchers on the tubes are atwitter with news that the Commodore name is having a decidedly 2008 moment in connection with the nascent but red-hot Netbook market.

The Commodore UMMD 8010/F, announced at the IFA consumer show in Berlin, will sport a 1.6GHz Via C7-M processor and will have an 80GB hard drive, 1GB of RAM, 802.11b/g Wi-Fi, and optional Bluetooth. The machine will … Read more

I've been watching the new category of small cheap laptop computers since they first came out. Watching, but not buying. The time, however, may have come to take the plunge.

One of the few Netbooks* I've actually used was the first Asus EEE. It was an amazing machine, small, cheap, light, sturdy and reasonably fast. It sparked my interest in the emerging new hardware category. But, it wasn't amazing enough to get me to buy it. The keyboard and the screen were just too small.

The flood of subsequent Netbook models have all seemed to have a … Read more

A high-end luxury Netbook? Seems like an oxymoron, since Netbooks are supposed to be simple, stripped-down, low-cost laptops. (If this is all news to you, check out our Building the Perfect Netbook feature for a primer.)

Asus, the company that single-handedly built the Netbook category with its Eee PC, is reportedly aiming at more upscale consumers with a fancier version of the popular Netbook. The newest version, with a 10.2-inch screen, has some high-end features, including a fingerprint reader, HDMI output, Altec Lansing speakers, and, at least in a few leaked shots, an Express Card slot.

The catch is … Read more

This week's Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco kept us all busy this week, with plenty of new components and products that use them. We'll start off with the event host, Intel, which announced small-form-factor versions of its Centrino 2 processors (that should ignite plenty of rumors about a Centrino 2-based MacBook Air). Intel also broke out a SATA solid-state drive and announced a dual-core version of its Atom processor, due next month. The company also showed off an update to its tiny Classmate PC, which will include a touch screen.

There were plenty of other manufacturers' Netbooks … Read more

The already inexpensive Acer Aspire One was one of our favorite Netbook-style laptops in our recent roundup ("Building the perfect Netbook"). It had a great design, a 9-inch screen, and Intel's Atom CPU, but we were less impressed with the paltry 512MB of RAM and middling battery life. But if you skipped Windows XP for the Linux version, you could get one for $379, making it a fairly good bargain, overall.

Acer seems to have heard our complaints, and while the company is not actually changing any of the hardware, it is dropping the prices on the … Read more

Smaller and cheaper have always been big tech buzzwords, and the currently hot category of Netbook laptops seems to be embracing that spirit better than anyone else in recent memory. After all, we used to be crazy for 11- and 12-inch ultraportable laptops, which combined uninspiring performance and poor battery life into packages costing upward of $2,000. Now we can get comparable performance and (sometimes) better battery life in small 9- and 10-inch systems for $400-$700.

With low-power processors, tiny screens and finger-cramping keyboards, most of these Netbooks aren't good for much more than surfing the Web, … Read more

With Netbooks either available or on the way from HP, Lenovo, and Acer (to say nothing of Netbook mainstays like Asus and MSI), one of the only players yet to join the fray is Dell. We've been seeing leaked pics and specs for a Dell Netbook for some time now, and Monday's flood of new information is a pretty clear indication that we should be seeing something official in the not-too-distant future.

Gizmodo has some allegedly leaked spec sheets for something called the Dell Inspiron 910, which will offer 4GB, 8GB, and 16GB SSD drives, along with an … Read more

Like a smaller, less-ornate version of the IdeaPad U110: That's my initial impression of Lenovo's new Netbook, which I saw in prototype form at a meeting this week.

What I saw was not quite the same as the IdeaPad S10 that will make it to the States come October--this was the 9-inch version for international markets--and it wasn't yet fully functional. Still, it was enough to get an idea of the look and feel of Lenovo's first Netbook. The glossy case, which will be available in red, black, and white, proved rather prone to fingerprint smudges. … Read more