A netbook Christmas

Posted by Michael Hainsworth on November 17, 2009

The hottest toy under the Christmas tree for adults this year may be the netbook computer.

IDC Canada reports demand for the small, low-power and inexpensive laptops helped the PC market rebound in Q3. The research firm reports 1.7 million of them were shipped during that quarter -- up 3.6 percent over the same period a year ago. It's also putting downward pressure on the price of higher end laptops. A netbook can cost as little as $200 dollars versus $850 dollars for the cheaper high-end laptop. Gartner Group, meantime, reports worldwide PC shipments totalled almost 81 million in the last three months, and the netbook was a key driver for growth.

The netbook is powered by Intel's latest low-end and high-margin Atom processor. Typically, these are chips that aren't powerful enough to play video games or high definition video; but they're just fine for surfing the web, checking email or writing a report.

Microsoft had to put on hold plans to migrate the world to the 64-bit Windows operating system -- since the low end Atom chip still uses the old fashioned 32-bit processor for number crunching. But Windows-7 ships with both, and is far more effective on a notebook than the previous Vista operating system was.

Nokia is jumping on the netbook bandwagon. It has its own small form factor laptop with one key difference: it has built-in 3G cellular wireless networking.

Dell is considered the go-to company for netbooks today. Dell shares are up 51 percent in the last year.

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