Netbooks – no real advancements since 2008

Netbooks are a class of hardware that have a love/hate crowd in the tech world.  The usefulness, or lack their of, varies depending on who you ask.  They started as a niche modding device.  The Asus EeePC 701 took the techies by storm, cramming tons of computing features into a very portable format.  Netbooks matured from the original EeePC 701, and unfortunately evolved into a standard cookie cutter format.  And even with Intel’s release of new Atom chips, that doesn’t appear to be changing.

Back when netbooks first started catching on, every manufacturer released netbooks with the exact same specs.  Atom N270, 1GB RAM, either an 80GB spindle or 8-16GB SSD hard drive, and a 10.1″ 1024×600 screen.  Designs of the hardware varied (with Dell & HP leading the way in my opinion), but the hardware inside did not change.  The Atom N270 combined with the awful idea of a 600px height screen was enough to turn people off from the idea of netbooks.  Trying to use the internet on these devices yielded mixed results with this combo.

Intel’s on-board 945 graphics chip was not powerful enough to render Aero effects in Windows Vista / 7 in a smooth and snappy fashion, nor was it able to do any type of h.264 or other video decoding (with mpeg2 being an exception).  As a result, all video content had to be rendered by the Atom N270, which was already being taxed by the bloated Windows OS (and I mean bloated in the sense that Windows never took netbooks seriously and never optimized it for this class of hardware.  Some argue Windows 7 helps with this, and I agree, however the CPU is still taxed with most functions).  nVidia’s Ion chips brought a breath of life into the stale netbook market, providing modest 3D & 2D hardware acceleration, but there were only a select few manufacturers choosing to add Ion chips.

This problem was compounded by Microsoft’s announcement that they would put restrictions on the hardware specs that vendors would be allowed to put into netbooks in order to use the cheapest version of Windows, Windows Starter Edition.  They limited vendors to the standard cookie cutter 1Gb of RAM and 1024×600 screens, effectively stifling innovation in this space.  They also gimped the personalization of Windows Starter by not allowing the user to change the background picture.

There was hope that Intel’s Pinetrail Atom chips would finally give the netbook market a real performance boost.  All they did tough was embed the GPU and chipset functionality into the Atom CPU.  They did make slight improvements in the clock speed and lower power usage a touch, but it won’t ultimately make netbooks any snappier.

Some would say that this move by Intel to incorporate the chipset and GPU into the Atom CPU was anti-competitive.  It blocks nVidia from being able to have their original Ion product naitively integrated into the new Pinetrail netbooks.  nVidia has released Ion2 to counter this, but there’s no performance improvements, it’s just the Ion product minus the chipset component.  The one nice feature with Ion2 is the Optimous technology.  This allows a netbook (or laptop) to use the built in Intel graphics for regular use (which has better power management than the Ion), and then switch on the fly to the Ion GPU when needed (for video decoding, 3d rendering, etc.).

Since pinetrail netbooks have started hitting the market, the hardware specs are suffering a repeat of the cookie cutter treatment.  This time, we’re getting an Atom N450, 1Gb of RAM, and the 1024×600 screen.  Such an improvement…

What’s the solution?  It’s actually kind of simple, but it’s doubtful the hardware vendors will catch on. Below are the hardware spec solution that I personally would like to see become the standard.  If enough of the manufacturers implemented these specs to keep each other competitive, we would probably only see a modest increase in costs – probably in the $20-$40 range.

Atom D510 dual core CPU (or N300 for better TDP)
nVidia Ion2 built in (or Ion if the N300 is used)
11″ or 11.6″ screen at 1366×768
32GB SSD hard drives
Built in SIM for WWAN 3G+ access.
6-cell battery

I want to touch base on the 11″ screen choice.  I have a 10.1″ 1366×768 screen on my HP 2140.  I personally love it, but I do know that it’s too small for most people.  Increase in size by just a touch, but keep this resolution.  There’s no point in having the Ion do 720p decoding when you’ve only got a 1024×600 screen.  Having a 12″ screen starts to be too big for a “netbook size.”  You start getting into the regular laptop sizes at that point, and it pushes the prices up towards $550 or more, the same as the entry level laptops.

This is pretty much a ramble post, but I believe these points have some merit.  Netbooks are a great idea for portability, and they could be used for all a large majority of the productivity functions that people currently choose to use their laptops for, instead of a netbook.

All we need is for companies to give netbooks some proper TLC.