Netbooks have reached an amazing level of popularity in a very short space of time. In 2008, the netbook saw a 3,000% increase in sales over 2007. In the third quarter, netbook sales even outpaced those of the iPhone. To the average consumer, the choice is a simple one: I can go with a 15″ laptop for $600 or a 9″ netbook for $300. However, many netbook buyers are now learning that comparing a netbook to a notebook is not apples to apples.

In two years, the netbook will be another technology we look back upon and laugh like physics cards. The dominoes are stacked and ready for the fall. Here are the problems:

The original idea behind netbooks is that they would work primarily with web-based applications. This explained away concerns about low-speced builds. However, this was evidently a barrier for consumers who wanted to continue working with their desktop applications which require both processing power and memory to support the application along with storage space to keep saved documents and files. The evidence: manufacturers found soon after releasing the netbooks with Linux-based operating systems that users demanded the Windows-based operating systems instead. It also happened that Microsoft, no doubt feeling threatened by the growing popularity of a subset of computers incapable of running Vista, decided to resurrect Windows XP for distribution on netbooks. The web is virtually identical from Windows to Linux. Sure, people hate change no matter how small, but it seems to me that if users buy these machines with the expectation that the applications they are using are going to be primarily web-based, it wouldn’t be an issue. Also, the meager SSD offerings were seemingly insufficient as almost every new netbook coming out ships with a traditional hard drive. Why do I need 160GB hard drive to store my data in the cloud?

The processor, already a meager 1.6GHz, is throttled back to 500MHz for power savings. I’m all for power savings, but this seems a little extreme. Certainly road warriors will appreciate the longer battery life, but this comes at a great performance cost. It seems that much of the battery life gain will be utilized waiting for applications to load and complete processes.

To steal a phrase from Peter Rojas and Ryan Block of the gdgt podcast (who, I think, stole the phrase from someone else), netbooks are a race to the bottom. There is tremendous downward price pressure in this hardware category. This is great for the consumer… up to the point at which manufacturers can no longer offer lower prices for the hardware. At this point, they begin to explore more devious ways of externalizing the cost of these notebooks. You may remember the days of cheap computers with an AOL or CompuServe contract. Well, those days are back in the form of cellular data contracts. Who can resist a $99 computer with a two-year Verizon contract?

As consumers demand more from netbooks, the definition becomes muddied. We are already seeing netbooks in 10″ and 12″ configurations blurring the line between netbook and notebook. SSD has been mostly scrapped in favor of standard hard drives. Other manufacturers (I’m looking at you, Sony.) are releasing netbooks that they refuse to call netbooks in order to break out of the restrictive price constraints.

Ultimately, the problem is a misconception about what a netbook is meant to be. The netbook is really targetting geeks who already have a desktop, already have a real laptop (for doing real work), and want something to fill the gap between. Even this is a problem since most of these geeks have smartphones that are slowly becoming more and more capable of basic web-based tasks. The general populace sees this thing that looks like a small notebook and is offered at an attractive price. They believe it must be a notebook computer. Strictly speaking, it is, but it isn’t the workhorse a traditional notebook can be. This misconception leads to lots of sales on the frontend to average users who think they are getting a bargain, but it will not be sustainable as they recognize their error. An alternate scenario is that netbooks will slowly creep in price and performance to the point they are indistinguishable and thus will cease to exist. Either way, stock up on those cute little netbooks while you can. In 18 months or so, they may be much more difficult to find.

From Brick to Slick: A History of Mobile Phones

Games

Cheapassgamer.com- Maybe you want to save $5 or $10 on a game that’s launching soon. Maybe you want to find a heavy discount on a game that’s been out for a few months. Maybe you want the details on an upcoming game clearance at a retail chain. Cheapy D and the forum folks at CAG will hunt down the craziest deals and provide you with all the details. This site has been around for a while, and I don’t think they ever really miss. If there’s a deal, check out these forums and you will find it.

CheapCollegeGamers- Another forum for gaming deals. I only discovered this one recently. My favorite thing about it: the RSS feed is updated more frequently than that of Cheapassgamer and hits more of the deals where CAG only includes maybe one stellar deal per week. This feed has multiple deals every day. A great candidate for your Google Reader.

Half.com- eBay bought this site a few years ago. Almost yearly, eBay announces the site will be shut down, but the users just aren’t having it. So, the site survives. It is a marketplace for games, movies, books, and music. It’s sorta like eBay, but everything is Buy-it-now. All the auction foreplay is dispensed with. One really nice feature is the pre-order feature (now called Match My Price). Go to an item page, click Match My Price, and enter your desired price. When a seller lists an item, they will see they can sell it immediately for your requested price. If they choose to do so, it’s over. The item is yours and they are paid. You can set expiration for your pre-order for as little as two weeks, and you will receive e-mail updates to remind you that the pre-order is active. You can also manually cancel it at any time.

Gadgets and Gear

Woot- I’ve covered this one before, but this article cannot pass without mentioning it. Woot will give you one daily deal on a product. Most products are geek-friendly although there is the occasional golf club or espresso machine.

Slickdeals.net- The site has deals on all types of items, but much of what is posted is tech related. The RSS feed is great, but I find the deals are sometimes expired by the time they hit my reader. I guess if you really want to be thorough, you will have to keep the site open and spam refresh.

[H]ard|Forum- These are the forums of an excellent computer hardware site HardOCP. Check out the Hot Deals and the For Sale/Trade forums for nice prices on computer hardware and gadgets. You may find some gaming stuff here too. I actually came away with a 3DO console for practically nothing.

I know there are many more sites I may have missed. That’s where you come in! Post in the comments your favorite deals sites or even techniques for getting great prices on your geek gear. You may see an episode of the podcast in the coming weeks with some advanced online shopping techniques that will completely automate the process of finding deals online! Subscribe to the site feed or the podcast (iTunes) to stay informed.

Confirmed: Palm Pre To Support Flash

Chris Pirillo wrote a roundup of the three hottest cameras in this space: the Mino HD, the Kodak Zi6, and the Vado HD. He favored the Vado over the others.

This week’s upcoming episode of raddevon video was shot with the camcorder. That will be released on Friday, but, until then, there are video samples available elsewhere.

Amazon.com is now offering the camcorder for $130!  Use this link and enter the $100-off coupon code MY88J7DV when checking out.

Mini USB Monitors Give Pleasure with Every Tiny Inch

In case you don’t know about woot.com, this deal is for today only and only until it’s sold out. Get in quick if you want one. This one is refurbished, but even refurbs are going for $100 elsewhere online.

My iPhone 3G has been by my side since I purchased it this past July. As far as I can tell, it is as close as you can get to perfection in a phone. In spite of how this statement may sound, I am far from a fanboy and my devotion to the iPhone is not the kind of religious devotion that allows me to forgive all its faults. There are problems with the iPhone. Apps can’t run in the background. I can’t copy and paste, I can’t do Flash. There is no real keyboard. These are issues that I would love for Apple to solve, but I’m not at all above switching to another device that can fix them so long as that device also does all the things that my iPhone does so well. In the wake of the original iPhone and the 3G, tons of devices hit the market playing catch-up. These devices seemed to market themselves by touting their similarities to the so-called Jesus-phone. Some of them bested the iPhone in one way or another, but they often came up short most everywhere else. The Pre is the first device that seems to share most of the strengths of the iPhone and refine them by adding some of the little things iPhone users have been clamoring for.

First, of the complaints I levelled at the iPhone above, the Pre solves all but one: Flash. Sure, it is disappointing considering all the new features they have included, but the new features will still be compelling to iPhone malcontents. The Pre can multitask and programs can send out system notifications as they run in the background. The lack of any means for an app that is not running to notify the user of new events has all but killed the functionality of twitter and instant messaging apps on the iPhone. It has copy and paste. This is surely one of the loudest complaints of the iPhone user base. It has a hard keyboard. I personally don’t have a huge problem with the iPhone’s soft keyboard; I think it is an excellent implementation, but, given a choice, I would probably take anything more than a couple of sentences to a hard keyboard rather than fumbling it out on-screen.

It seems like a no-brainer. Ditch the iPhone for the Pre and you will get much of what you have been begging for from Apple for months. Unfortunately, every Achilles has his heel. In designing the Pre and its WebOS, Palm has committed two sins so terrible, they more than negate all this goodwill they have built up with Apple’s fanbase by granting many of their collective wishes. First, the Pre is (initially, at least) a Sprint-exclusive phone. Sprint has customer service that makes holy men swear vengeance. I have suffered it first-hand, and I will never go back regardless of the fact that they are generally cheaper than some of the other providers. The second sin will have gamers everywhere crossing the Pre off their wish list: no native apps. That’s right. Palm has taken a few small steps forward but one large step back. WebOS apps are—as you might expect—web pages consisting of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. You’re not going to milk any smooth 3D graphics out of your Pre in the foreseeable future.

Even though this sounds like the Pre has come so close to besting the iPhone but just didn’t get there, not all is lost. Both of these issues are relatively minor and could certainly be worked out in time. Once the Sprint exclusivity deal is up, the Pre may be available under any carrier you like. Palm would be better served by a broader potential customer base especially only having sidestepped oblivion with the announcement of the Pre at CES. Palm may also choose to add support for native apps as a software update just as Apple did just six months ago. If these two issues can be resolved, the Pre appears to be the only phone on the horizon that will be capable of competing toe-to-toe with the iPhone on nearly every front. Unfortunately, you’re not looking at an iPhone killer out of the gate unless you can handle a couple of major shortcomings.

Nikon D3 Cut In Half