By the way, to the stretch of imagination, I cant think of anything other than Mails, browsing, Photos, vedio watching and light games and music is what one can use computer for in personal life (unless one is doing official work on your personal machine) and all of these tasks can be very well performed by any good netbook.

Then why spend a fortune to fill the pockets of these corporates who fill in turn pockets of celebrities for the ads !!

Regards…. India Invents.

So, in all honesty, all laptops are used for content creation. The content consumption part of a laptop is a nice and welcome addition, but it is not why people buy laptops.

Now, as far as netbooks go, I read some crap about them not being able to run any serious utility, but I tell you it’s just a peck of lies. The truth is that aside from resource hog operating systems like vista, most utility programs, down to heavy-duty memory hogs like ANSYS 11 (you photoshop people don’t know what a resource hog program really is. Try leaving your jpeg to compute for the night, and then we’ll talk), common math programs like MATLAB 7, photo-editing programs like photoshop et cetera. will run quite well on a 1.6 GHz processor, which is what most netbooks are packing nowadays.

So why are people buying netbooks and not laptops? The answer is pretty clear – people are sick of buying “a smaller desktop”. They want something portable – and in all honestly the ability to switch from socket to socket isn’t worth as much as being able to not carry the heavy adapter. That means a battery life that exceeds 2 hours (when using wireless). There is only one laptop today that packs that much life in it’s batteries, and it’s one of the more expensive ones (macbook pro, btw). Most netbooks come with advertised battery life of 8-12 hours nowadays – which translates to 4-8 when in actual usage.

People want a laptop so that they can work anywhere. If a netbook gives them that better than they higher-spec laptop, they will settle on the lack of raw power and a smaller screen and keyboard. People who believe computers are designed for “media consumption” are simply without understanding of the reasons behind the purchases of computers by consumers.

In conclusion, when you hear an industry buzz-phrase, bear in mind that it might have been concieved by an idiot. Netbooks win over laptops on real merits – the endurance of their batteries. Some laptops have computing powers that exceed the needs of the average user, who needs to create with tools that run sufficiently well on a 1.6 GHz machine. Anything in excess of the user’s needs is simply not a selling point. It has, in truth, a very low value in as much as the customer is concerned, when compared to what really interests the consumer.

People want computers so that they can work with them, not so that they can fool around. They make their purchases based on their percieved needs, and on the percieved advantages of the products they can choose from. They don’t buy things that they think will be useless, and given the choise they will buy machines that better suit their expected needs. The industry belief that netbooks are partially useless is something that probably needs to be re-thought of, because it’s probably bull.