As long as Netbooks are expected to be cheap, they simply can't charge as much. So they want to emphasize that these are just “little notebooks” – well, they aren't! They are *cheap* little notebooks, and that's an important distinction.

Nowadays you can buy a fully usable Netbook for 300$ or even less, and soon the ARM-netbooks will come, with price points below 200$. There's simply no place for an expensive Windows licence with these netbooks.

As long as Netbooks are expected to be cheap, they simply can't charge as much. So they want to emphasize that these are just “little notebooks” – well, they aren't! They are *cheap* little notebooks, and that's an important distinction.

Nowadays you can buy a fully usable Netbook for 300$ or even less, and soon the ARM-netbooks will come, with price points below 200$. There's simply no place for an expensive Windows licence with these netbooks.

A slip of tounge there…

The problem regarding power consumption here is a problem with the x86 architecture itself. It is not a problem of Intel's chip technology per se. x86 is a CISC architecture. x86 chips are essentially RISC chips with a complex CISC instruction decoder and sequencer added.

ARM chips are RISC chips. The leave out the CISC decoder entirely.

In this way, ARM can design a chip like the Cortex A9 MPcore and have it use only 250mw per core. The Cortex A9 MPCore can have up to four CPU cores. Yes, ARM are about to produce a quad core CPU running at over 1GHz and consuming something in the region of just one to two watts.

The Qualcomm Snapdragon CPU recently announced is a dual core ARM CPU running at 1.5. GHz.

http://eetimes.eu/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=2…

Yet it uses way less power than the Atom processors in typical use on netbooks.

No matter what Intel do, if they stick with x86 architecture then they cannot come close to that power/performance ratio.

Pixel Qi screen + ARM multicore = way more CPU grunt + lower power consumption = much longer battery life with no loss of performance.

Even better, ARM architecture does not have to pay any patent royalties (unlike x86 where Intel and AMD have to pay each other for every CPU).

So you potentially get not only less power, not only more CPU grunt, but it will also cost less to produce per unit.

It would be win win win for a full-featured Linux netbook on ARM architecture.

I think Netbook is a perfectly good moniker as long as Microsoft, Intel, and all the manufactures stop trying to kick it like a dog to the curb. If everyone works to make Netbook mean small/capable/computer that is what it 'will' mean.

And, any name that is choose must live side by side with Smartbook now. That term is catchy and also is rather descriptive of a device between Smartphone and Notebook, so that term won't soon go away. It also instantly ameliorated by having 'smart' in the title. A Stalebook or a Shitbook is less desireable as you might imagine.

The biggest drawback for Mini-notebook is that it more then two syllables. It doesn't roll of the tongue either, so people would not even use it, likely shorting it to Mini-note or worse in short order. Mini-notbook is almost sure to fail as a term. WIth that in mind its either Netbook or a better term, because Mini-notebook is not going to last.

Netbook is fine… As the functionality improves so will what it implies to people.

Now that Android has been ported to MIPS we will have to devise yet another name.