Originally Posted By: Roger
I think the netbook market will founder on its own. They're cute, and I can see them being useful for some people, but I really don't think there's a viable market between the top-end PDA (of which the iPhone is just one of several) and the small laptop (e.g. Sony).

There perhaps isn't a detectable technical gap (I use my small Sony laptop as, essentially, a netbook) but there's certainly a price gap. Sony, like Apple or Toshiba, still charge more for the very small laptops than for the normal-size ones -- a Vaio or Air comparable in size to a netbook costs three times as much as one. The Tier Ones, it seems to me, are busily pretending that netbooks are cheap nonsense made only by second-tier manufacturers, and it's interesting that Dell has broken ranks.

If, heaven forfend, anything were to befall my beaten-up old Vaio PCG-SRX41, I'd probably get the Dell netbook. And that's despite also having an Iphone.

Peter