He offered the same old arguments about how useless these diminutive devices are but nothing really new.

My response was typical of many others, and went something like this:

“Netbooks are not perfect, but they are larger than the tiny little phones, and smaller than the big heavy laptops, and have more battery life. mine reaches a high temp of about 95 degrees, and works pretty well in a pinch. Net books and phones are probably going to meet somewhere in the middle as far as size is concerned, and that suits me just fine, because the phones are already too small to use, and sometimes to small to find! I suspect that no one suspects that they are the last word in this resizing of technology, just a step in that direction, and it is a step that has to be taken, just like automobile technology will someday have something between the tiny motorbikes with four wheels, and the big mobile living rooms we once drove.

When we reach that point, something better will come along, and we will start over. Why do we need netbooks? Because we need the changes they bring.”

There are a lot of other reasons why netbooks are gaining in popularity, their small size is a big draw, as is the battery life, and of course price is a major part of the trend. I got my Dell Inspiron Mini 9, shipping and all for a little over $200.00. Battery life is 4 and a half hours. One of the big draws is, that my system was set up to be Linux based, using “Ubuntu” as it’s operating system, without a hint of Microsoft in the device! It is a great little system!

The truth is, tha Mike McDonald probably has no real issue with netbooks. The piece was probably written as link and traffic bait. The bait seems to have worked gauging by the number of reader responses, and the fact that there are probably about a million blog responses like this one!

To read Mikes original story: Netbooks: Moving in Right Next Door to Useless