Netbook

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Black ASUS Eee PC in proportions comparison with tissues and Kensington lock.
Black ASUS Eee PC in proportions comparison with tissues and Kensington lock.

The term Netbook was introduced by Intel in February 2008[1] to describe a category of low-cost and scaled-down subnotebooks used primarily for surfing the Internet and performing other basic functions like word processing. These may be carried out using applications installed on a solid state drive or by the use of cloud computing services.[2] More than 50 million Netbooks are expected to be in widespread circulation by 2011.[3] The first Netbooks should be available by June 2008.[4] Devices such as the One A110, HP 2133 Mini-Note PC, ASUS Eee PC, CloudBook, Classmate PC, MSI Wind PC or VIA OpenBook may fall in the category of Netbooks. Moblin project supports the device type.[5]

They are small laptops that are designed for wireless communication and access to the Internet. And they cost about $250, making Netbooks a potentially disruptive and high volume market segment. Even though Netbooks won’t be confused with full-featured laptops, my hunch is that tons of people around the world will be attracted to a low-cost machine that plugs them in. The Netbook will expand the global PC market. By how much is a matter of conjecture.

Paul Bergevin, Thoughts on Netbooks

Similarly to Netbook, another term Nettop should stand for low-cost desktop devices.[6][7] Both Netbook and Nettop device platforms are normally built around low power CPUs like the Intel Atom, the VIA C7 or the AMD Geode.[8]

The Psion Netbook was a much earlier, but similar, concept that had the same name and possibly inspired Intel's use of the Netbook name.

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