Remember all the complaints about the small displays and keyboards of the first netbooks? Will smartphones make us want even smaller displays and keyboards (or equivalent)?

I see the netbook diverging into two branches, 10-12″ ultra light subnotebooks with enough performance to have reasonable offline performance and 5-7″ ARM or MIPS based units good enough for web access, media playback, and basic editing. In essence comparable performance to a Nokia N800 or N810 with a bigger screen, keyboard and battery and dirt cheap (~$100). These latter units will become more common than cellphones in that many people will have several.

Once the battery run times get to above 15 hours of use per charge (ARM and Pixel Qi screens)… then, it is hard to NOT image that a blue tooth ear/mic piece, talking thru your netbook (that is on in standby mode, yet still able to operate like a cell phone and in that mode RUN FOR DAYS as a cell phone device). Instant ON, get your text, and if they use the Pixel Qi (OLPC XO-1 power savings tech with the CPU off when you are typing using NO or very little power), well… that will be all you need (in Netbook format, or MID format, or UMPC format, whatever pocketable size that you want, and whatever keyboard that you want.

Why don't they just make them cell phones and get it over with. Bluetooth headsets make it a phone also.

From a technology point of view, cellphones and netbooks have little boundary between them. The ARM vs. x86 processor platform battle is no more than the Intel vs. AMD battle. Linux happily spans either hardware platforms almost seamlessly so the differentiation almost comes down to semantics.

I think the convergence of mobile phones and netbooks is more about HOW one uses the device. A mobile phone is a device one can quickly access information — e-mail, mobile browser, SMS, etc. A netbook / UMPC / mini-notebook is a device one would use in a more involved task — write a report, create a spreadsheet, touchup a photo, edit a home video, etc. Certainly the screen size, keyboard type, battery life, amount of RAM, and other seemingly differentiating factors will all enter into the equation of HOW one uses the device.

I think all types of gadgets should benefit from each other. Say, you can build a GSM/GPRS device into a portable laptop, or you can augment a cell phone with a QWERTY keyboard. But manufacturers should be always reasonable about what they are trying to do. You can stuff a cellphone with a fully charged tauzand megahurtz processor but you shouldn't complain if it dies after 5 minutes of usage. You can also enable GSM calls on netbook but it'd be strange to expect people wandering around carrying lappies at their ears with a hand (though, thinking of Vaio P…).

I think every gadget should occupy its market and consumer niche. You would never expect a professional photographer to consider your cameraphone as an alternative to his main cam. But you should enable cam in the phone if it won't make it too expensive so that people could take pictures of ads, links in periodic press, their credit card numbers or stuff they want to share right now. You should also let cellphone connect to the internet and browse normal web sites so that people could do that not on a regular basis but in case of emergency.

With the rise of netbooks with their compactness, lightweight and satisfactory performance nobody would expect normal laptops to die out. They also have their consumers.

I wouldn't expect smart phones and netbooks to merge someday soon. More likely all cellphones would become smartphones or PDA-likes in the close future. And maybe with the development of cloud computing desktops would become smaller and less power-hungry.

Technically, no reason. However, by going down the route they've taken, the mobile telcos can charge us twice for essentially the same thing by selling two contracts when one should be perfectly adequate.

Exactly the same reason why we need 3G dongles etc when we could just use Bluetooth with our existing phone. Yes, I know that is possible in many cases, but almost universally against terms and conditions of contract, and if caught out, you could be charged exorbitantly.

thing is that as intel slows down x86 to make it more energy efficient, ARM speeds their stuff up without impacting power use.

so at some point one will hit a sweet spot where the cpu will not be the issue, but more what software is available to the user (and what the user is familiar with or wants to learn to use).

i would say that what have kept x86 in use this whole time is that microsoft never bothered with either a transparent emulation layer or “fat binaries” like what apple pulled when they jumped to x86.

im just darn happy im not subject to silly US telco decisions

Not just US, being in the UK (and telcos being evil global tentacle beast now anyway)

That's it!
But it should be as powerful as notebooks not smartphones.

All these ideas about converged and paired devices sound great and some will no doubt succeed, but the main appeal of the netbook is its single unit clamshell design. You can just throw it in your bag and go, then pull out that one item and use it on your lap, etc, without worry about balancing dangling (or blue tooth) keyboards, mice, or other ancillaries, unless you have to tether a modem .