How would you extend the Netbook?

Was having lunch with Intel’s Country Manager a couple of days ago when he asked me something along this lines, “How would you extend the netbook?“. Surely, most would say faster CPU or bigger storage but the fact is, all other PCs are going that way.

But, if you looked at the newest line of netbooks out there, they already serve their best purpose — cheap, lightweight and usable computing devices.

netbook

Pumping the specs more would just add to the size, weight and price of the netbooks and if you really wanted bigger screens and keyboards or a faster processor, might as well go for the regular laptops running the Core 2 Duo processors or the newer Centrino 2.

Besides, I don’t think OEM will eventually upgrade their netbooks to the level of the regular notebooks for fear that it will eat their own market share and margins. For example, I tried bumping my MSI Wind to 3GB of RAM by adding an extra 2GB stick but it would not work (or even boot). Looks like the BIOS caps it at 2GB. My Compaq-Presario b1200 however works just fine with 4GB of RAM.

However, there’s still room for improvement:

Everybody’s on the same plane that smaller can be cheaper. So, how about lighter and thinner? Yes, 1kg is already light but if they can drop that to 0.5kg or 1lb, they’ve got another winner. Or how about 0.7 inch thin like the MacBook Air?
Extend externally. They don’t have to extend it and worry about cramming the parts inside the small chassis. They can always extend from the outside. See examples below.
External DVD drive. It doesn’t even have to be a RW drive. Just a cheap and slim external DVD drive I can optionally hook via the USB port from time to time whenever I need it. Samsung actually has one (DVD-RW) and they’ve been selling for about Php4,500. If they can also do just a plain external DVD and sell it for Php2,000 or less, I’m sure everyone will grab one along with their new netbooks.
Extended batteries. Yes, how about an option to get an 8-cell to 12-cell battery for those heavy travelers? An extra pound of weight for an additional 10 to 15 hours of battery life is a good trade-off IMO.
Car harness. This is a little odd, I know if if those DVD players for cars cost between Php18k to 25k, why not just use your netbook instead (the Gigabyte netbook fits perfectly well)?
FM Transmitter. They have it on some phones (like the Nokia N78) so why not on netbooks? Most of them have lousy speakers but if you can stream audio/sound to your car stereo or some other stereo FM receiver, that would be cool.

Of course, the 3G/HSDPA and WiMax slots are already coming in the next cycle as well as possible options for bigger capacity flash drives but we already know about that.

Ultimately, most of the netbooks will have almost the same internal specs in them and the only differentiating factors would be the design and finish.

I’d like to throw the question to my readers as well — how would you extend the netbook?

Abe Olandres

Abe is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of YugaTech with over 20 years of experience in the technology industry. He is one of the pioneers of blogging in the country and considered by many as the Father of Tech Blogging in the Philippines. He is also a technology consultant, a tech columnist with several national publications, resource speaker and mentor/advisor to several start-up companies.

https://www.yugatech.com

13 Comments

Paul says:

16 years ago

I would love to see a fm transmitter, I go mobile in the car with my netbook all the time, barely hear the audio on it. Ive got a plugin Fm transmitter that works good, but the batteries go dead all the time, and another appendage added on to the netbook, make it that much more difficult to move around.
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123 says:

16 years ago

develop a netbook that would run with windows vista(64bit computing), since XP is becoming obsolete and microsoft is looking forward on developing new OS…

3G/HSPDA and bluetooth would be good…
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pin says:

16 years ago

the price, what else! -from 12k below
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Nikko says:

16 years ago

@yuga ouch. i guess it does put it toe to toe with laptops in terms of price

Calvin mentioned touchscreen. I had a 15-minute date with some tablet (an asian brand, sounded japanese), and I have to agree. A touch screen would be really nice in a netbook. It doesn’t have to rotate and transform into a tablet. Makes navigating the desktop a nicer experience.

Have they thought of dumping the trackpad for touchscreen? Double tap instead of double click :)
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Mark says:

16 years ago

Support for firewire would be great.
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Abe Olandres says:

16 years ago

@Nikko – the Asus N10 is said to be priced at around Php40,000 or higher.
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Nikko says:

16 years ago

Well, ASUS is coming up with the N10 netbook. And it sports Altec Lansing speakers, HDMI out, and Nvidia GeForce Go 9300M GS 256MB graphics card. Anything more would probably find the netbook toe to toe with mainstream laptops :)

a longer battery life would be the great netbook extender.
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Andre says:

16 years ago

lost 2 replies na… ayoko na mag type.

maximize functionality and portability.
and touchscreens. the one who does everything right without raising the price will be the winner, and asus may just be the one to do that. we should applaud asus for starting this revolution.
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Jhoanna says:

16 years ago

Expand it? I hope they first get their Linux-based netbooks to completely work: webcam (w/ good audio/video recording), touchpad, keyboard layout.

I mean, without requiring the netbook owner to go through some manual upgrade voodoo just to get things optimized.

Now if you really want to expand it, make it flexible so it can sometimes feel like a regular paper notebook.
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calvin says:

16 years ago

i would like it if touchscreen would be a common feature for netbooks.
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Yoe del Barrio says:

16 years ago

If I had to pick one, I’d go for the extended battery since I wouldn’t want to keep on charging when I’m on the go :)
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Joy de Guzman says:

16 years ago

make the storage external
faster processor (processing of data, logical and analytical calculations)
more ram (storage instead of using the virtual ram of HDD)
more video ram (processing of image data to help the processor. it can also be used as a temporary storage)
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