For the past two years or so the humble Netbook has been enjoying a relatively smooth ride towards industry dominance unhindered by any sort of realistic competition.
Ok so there are still more laptops being sold than Netbooks, but that’s not the point. Sales of netbooks have been continually rising at a phenomenal rate whereas sales of laptops have been pretty flat.
Now though, it all looks set to change, thanks to a new class of computer known affectionately in the business as the “Ultrathin”.
The Ultrathins are basically light in weight and as the name suggests are extremely thin so are as portable as a netbook. However, the Ultrathin has more capability than a netbook.
Netbooks are primarily designed for accessing the net, checking emails, and carrying out the most basic of computing tasks.
In other words Netbooks are more appropriate for content consumption rather than content creation. They also tend to have smaller screens and keyboards.
Ultrathins lie somewhere in the middle of a fully fledged laptop and a Netbook and they are capable of running most applications.
The first Ultrathin on the market came courtesy of computer company Hewlett Packard earlier this year when they thrust the laptop into the market but it was much pricier than Netbooks.
Since then other companies have been following suit and only this week Dell brought out their first Ultrathin, the Inspiron 11z laptop, which incidentally has a price tag of only $399. Wow!
This means that it is in the same price bracket as many Netbooks on the go so if this is a taste of what’s to come, Ultrathins are going to give Netbooks some stiff competition.
I mean who wouldn’t go for something that gives you a lot more functionality for your money?
Anne Camden from Dell wrote in a blog that the newly launched laptop give you “netbook-like portability with laptop-like capability”. Exactly!
Dells Ultrathin runs with a more powerful processor for a start, the Celeron 723 at 1.2 GHz, whereas most netbooks come with Intel Atom processors and it’s only a fraction heavier than some of the Netbooks out there.
So what could the standard Netbook offer that this new type of Ultrathin can’t? Well that’s the whole point here, at that kind of price absolutely nothing at all, unless of course you actually enjoy limited size and capability.
Yes, the Ultrathin may well replace the Netbook once and for all.
If you want to find out all the latest news on tech why not subscribe to our RSS feed?
only when they cut the price to a range of 700 – 750 $