Well, I certainly hope that reports of the netbook's death are in fact reports of the death of the netbook's hype... I'm another of those who find them almost

Well, I certainly hope that reports of the netbook's death are in fact reports of the death of the netbook's hype... I'm another of those who find them almost perfect devices. It gets used for real, serious, mobile computing. Visual Studio 2010 and SQL Server 2008 R2 on a netbook with a long battery life make a wonderful go-anywhere productivity device and let me work far, far more easily than I could otherwise because it can just slip in the bottom of my bag. I can and do write music on it almost anywhere in a MIDI sequencer. Firefox works well for regular browsing, OpenOffice works well for note taking in meetings. I can touchtype on my netbook with comparable speed and accuracy to any other device, certainly fast enough to take notes live in a presentation. I won't claim it's fast enough for doing any very heavy photography work but it's a very useful portable preview and backing storage device. Give me a tablet with a card reader and decent storage and I could do the photography as easily on that, I'll concede. Give me a good mobile browser and that's pretty much as good as on the netbook, though from my experience with Android Firefox and Chrome I'm not convinced yet. Music? Maybe, I can see it could be done but I'm not sure the apps are there yet from what I've heard. The rest though? You want to show me someone typing at an accurate 100WPM on a tablet without an external keyboard? (By which point I'd rather have them integrated and a bit more rugged, personally.) You want to show me someone doing serious software development on a tablet? Small, light, cheap, compatible. Netbooks are all of these and let me Just Get On With It. Tablets aren't.