How low can they go?
It wasn’t that many years ago that many industry ‘oracles’ were predicting that netbooks would never make the leap from nerdy gadget to mainstream mobile computing. Right now, I’m guessing some of those so called thought leaders are kicking themselves for not buying shares in Asus!! I must admit that, looking back, the idea of users lining up to buy an underpowered laptop with a tiny screen and barely any memory seems a bit ridiculous but what did Comrade Bill say about OSes and memory? But times have changed; aided by the likes of Intel’s Atom processor the whole netbook thing has successfully jumped the evolutionary barrier from single celled techie curiosity to offerings that compare to some of their more advanced cousins - take the inclusion of Nvidia’s Ion chip in a recent nettop demo.
Add in design enhancements, improved battery life and low cost and you can see why the whole ultra mobile thing has taken off so rapidly.
Now here’s where Android steps in. Just recently, Skytone, a Chinese manufacturer, were showing off the world first Android netbook running on the ultra-minimalist Alpha-680. With an expected price tag of around $250 this netbook represents the mobile computing elevator reaching ‘bargain basement’!
So is this the way that all netbooks will go and how cheap will they become? No. You have to remember that the Alpha-680 is a minimalist machine (max of 128Mb memory and 4G of storage) - could you really see yourself living with those specs as, day by day, both the internet and your applications become more resource hungry? The question of pricing is a moot point - hardware could probably get a little cheaper but, in all fairness to manufacturers profit margins and with the current world economic woes, it’s not likely to. The whole idea of inexpensive laptop computers is low cost, high volume with at least some profit. Without these factors there supplier goes under and you have no support for your minimalist netbook. My take on this (if you haven’t guessed): Android probably won’t make a marked impact on netbook pricing.
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