Marc Gerstein

Nokia Enters the Already Crowded Netbook Market: Pros and Cons

"Nokia has a price tag of approximately $300 for its net-book."

Wrong!

Nokia has a price tag of approximately $600 for its net-book, which is way overpriced.

Who in their right mind would take the $300 version which requires a $60-a-month plan with AT&T? Most people are already paying somebody somewhere for internet access and wouldn't even consider giving AT&T $60 a month.

This sort of nonsense is an example of what happens when corporations pay more attention to their own "biz dev" (business development) group rather than to their customers.

And by the way, who wants Windows 7, another Microsoft operating system of the future. One of the benefits of netbooks is that you can get them with XP, which we know works even on normal amounts of memory.

Will Cheaper Laptops Snuff Out Netbooks?

Netbooks aren't necessarily about being cheap. They're about being small. I have a 10.1" Lenovo with a 160 GB hard drive and 2 GB of memory and a long-life battery for which I paid $400. Using my external CD drive to load software, it can do everything, and I mean EVERYTHING my full-feature laptop can do and just as quickly. And it's highly portable. I even did a few hours of work in a coach airline seat even though the person in front of me reclined all the way back.

I've heard the new generation of big laptops described as "desktop replacements" and they are; that's my main work computer. Going further, the new generation of netbooks (the ones that can do everything, not just surf the net) are "laptop replacements" taking over the portability function forfeited by the desktop replacements.