Acer is sticking by netbooks.
Samsung is not.
So who’s making a mistake? Did tablets kill the netbook?
Tablets are certainly on fire right now. Not tablets per se, the iPad that is.
Kids want tablets and parents agree, as they are spreading light wildfire in the enterprise. It seems like Steve Jobs managed to invent an entirely new computing and entertainment category based on early failures of others. Again.
While you can attach keyboards and stands to tablets, seed entire accessory ecosystems, tablets remain content consumption tools. The can attach themselves to other devices as controllers and rich user interfaces – a future I am truly stoked about. But writing serious documents, creating stuff – they are not ideal. To create, a keyboard, a real keyboard, seems to still be a necessity.
Netbooks are not hot, have a normally cramped keyboard and are not sexy. They are cheap, have lots of storage space and can do 80% of a desktop’s work (outside of gaming). Yes, the OS is not glamorous and the user experience is just bearable. Yet the killer feature for a Netbook is price. Utility over cost is the netbook’s forte. You need something small and cheap to write or work on extensively – it’s Netbook time. And while tablet prices are falling, the utility gap is still there. Not fun device, work device.
Samsung is doing elevating itself from packs of generic device makers running common operating systems. Their Android phones attempt to be cooler than others with the same OS. Now, they look to escape the cost-focused realm of Netbooks. Consumers don’t care about extra bells and whistles or superior design. Nokia proved it. There is no room for frills. Samsung does not belong here anymore.
Acer on the other hand is about cost management. About no frills. Like Asus and other fellow Taiwanese equipment makers they control more of the manufacturing stack and know where to squeeze pennies. They cater to areas where cost is still the primary concern and know how to live off of it. And for my wife, who wanted something to Facebook and do web-based everything on – an iPad would not have been the right thing. It would have been cool, by why waste the money? We’ll see how that goes once we get the netbook we ordered on Black Friday.
