`Smartphone' is only half the answer to `who killed the netbook?'. `The hype' is the other half. Perhaps surprisingly to us, the proverbial `average consumer'

`Smartphone' is only half the answer to `who killed the netbook?'. `The hype' is the other half. Perhaps surprisingly to us, the proverbial `average consumer' does not understand performance and ergonomics aspects of hardware very well. To most of them, an measly 7''...10'' screen seems just as good for productivity and ergonomics as a decent 17'' or a tight 15''. They don't realize the storage (be it harddrive or SSD) is much slower than in larger computers, and RAM is underprovisioned. The hype was there, the price was right, and netbooks sold like hot buns. But one size did not fit all, and now we have some satisfied owners and some dissatisfied ones. The admin at my workplace is very satisfied; a netbook is his ternary computer (after a desktop and yes, an Android smartphone), it delivers just what he needs when he's on the move. But the folks who bought a netbook as their main computer are oft dissatisfied; the hardware simply did not live up to the expectations. Heck, a decent smartphone (say, Nokia N950) is pretty much as beefy as an average netbook. The netbook rose by the hype, and now is `dying' by it: undergoing severe market shrinkage, to match supply to actual demand for cheap ultraportables, probably as secondary device.