Oh, how I wish Netbooks hadn't become 'the next big thing'.... I love having computing available everywhere I go. Really useful. I type up notes live in meetin

Oh, how I wish Netbooks hadn't become 'the next big thing'.... I love having computing available everywhere I go. Really useful. I type up notes live in meetings / presentations and never have to worry about transcribing them. I take my email, my photos, my documents wherever I go. I've been known to develop code on it, in an idle period far away form home or desk. So I started with a Palm III - cheap toy, screen far too small and the data entry far too slow. Upgraded to a Psion 5 - great, but by then the market had become a bubble and burst, and Psion quickly vanished with the remaining issues with the platform sadly unsolved. Too many people had realised that a GBP400 handheld with slow data entry wasn't all that useful, there was a glut of inventory and the devices died. Along came netbooks - brilliant! Battery life and portability not as good as before but software compatibility better. Then they became The Next Big Thing and everyone started making them, most people discovered that a 9" laptop with no CD drive isn't very useful for them, and we've got a glut of inventory and a rapidly collapsing market. Now we have tablets. For twice the cost of my netbook I can get an iPad which trades marginally greater portability and battery life for enormously worse data entry and more limited software. Or a range of imitators that largely serve to show that Smartphones are overpriced by having the same basic features behind a bigger screen for a lower cost. Again, I'm expecting to see a year or two's bubble where we all have to have them and everyone starts making them, followed by a market collapse and new products becoming rarer than hen's teeth. For those of us who want real, proper mobile computing, not the latest overpriced fad gadget, can we please have less hype? That way hopefully we can end up with a long-term market for machines we can actually use and get real work done on, not just this year's shiny tech bauble.