This is an old debate. Back in 1999, Larry Ellison and Bill Gates were debating this. Thin client computing, the one-laptop per child, etc are all variations on the theme. Our interest is in what differentiates a netbook from an advanced mobile phone?
Smaller PCs Cause Worry for Industry – NYTimes.com
The new computers, often called netbooks, have scant onboard memory. They use energy-sipping computer chips. They are intended largely for surfing Web sites and checking e-mail. The price is small too, with some selling for as little as $300.
The companies that pioneered the category were small too, like Asus and Everex, both of Taiwan.
Despite their wariness of these slim machines, Dell and Acer, two of the biggest PC manufacturers, are not about to let the upstarts have this market to themselves. Hewlett-Packard, the world’s biggest PC maker, recently sidled into the market with a hybrid of a notebook and netbook that it calls the Mini-Note.
2 Comments
Chanuka Wattegama
What differentiates a netbook from an advanced mobile phone?
Technically nothing. Till recently one difference was a mobile phone traditionally ate less bandwidth and had less memory, but this is not true anymore.
In this age of three wheeled cars and four wheeled auto rickshaws pointless searching for a dividing line.
If pressed, one feature that differentiates a mobile from its brethren (fixed phone, TV, radio and PC) has been its adaptability. Any PC, no matter how advanced it in terms of memory and processing power, still based on the same old 1984 version of IBM PC – while a mobile is hardly a ‘phone’ anymore. This adaptability will one day let it deliver all services its brethren delivered once – while a TV, radio or a PC will remain what they were ages before.
A thin client PC might not work with poor broadband. Not that it is technically impossible to design, but nobody will even think that option. The ‘Typical user’ any PC designer has in mind is a business executive at his desk and not a teenager from a remote third world town.
Vasee Nesiah
The cost or shape of the client is not relevant anymore. For a variety of reasons (choices, lower costs, noise, etc) we’re learning not to measure computing power or capacity. The size of the pipe is the only measure that matters. That will be the measure of a ‘have’ or a ‘have-not.’ All good! :-)
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