Just when consumers were starting to understand the concept of the netbook — those smaller-than-laptops PCs — the electronics industry is lobbing another category of computer at them.

From Bit-tech.net:

Every man and his dog is entering the netbook market at the moment as it's one of the few areas where the PC industry is growing at the moment. That's partly down to the state of economic turmoil in which the world finds itself at the moment and partly because consumers are realising that they don't need to spend massive amounts of money on the biggest, badass notebook on the market if all they want is to do their email and browse the Internet.

Margins are dropping like flies in the laptop market

Shane McGlaun (Blog) - April 20, 2009 11:10 AM
 
Consumers are staying away from the higher-priced notebook computers that sold relatively well in years past thanks to the poor global economy. Instead of buying the high-end and expensive notebooks that may have been the choice in 2007 or 2008, consumers are buying low-cost netbooks in droves.

Eee-pc.de are reporting on their testing of the MSI Wind U115 Hybrid , and the results are surprising: the machine can run on a single charge using an extended-life 9-cell battery (the standard battery is a 6-cell job) for as much as a day for lite computing tasks, and up to 10 hours of intense use.  The secret appears to be a combination of the Intel Menlow 15w chipset/Atom Z530 1.6GHz cpu, and the hybrid HD/SSD storage system (which allows the system to store frequently used data on the SSD so the hard drive doesn't have to spin up).

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