Rise of Netbooks

There has been a lot of buzz about Netbooks lately. For the uninitiated, Netbooks are small form-factor notebooks based on processors such as Intel's Atom or AMD's Neo. As the name suggests, Netbooks are mostly useful for browsing internet, reading digital books and such. They have smaller screens (typically 10 inches or smaller in diagonal) and consume less power to last twice the amount on the same battery.

With the economy taking a plunge, these $400 devices have gained a lot of popularity and there has been a lot of talk on how Netbooks can actually take over the heavy duty Notebooks.

What amazes me the most is how quickly the face of this industry changes. Just a year ago, everybody was running behind how many cores they had on their notebooks. No body knew if they really needed or cared for this much computing power.

But no matter what, this trend of going back to light-weight processors surely has given a life to AMD, Via and NVIDIA. On the other hand, Intel has been trying its best to keep the notebook and netbook segments distinct.

Let's see how this story unfolds.. :)