$99 netbooks

Monday, November 03, 2008 by Dave Winer.

Watch out iPhone, here come the netbooks. 

For some people, even today's relatively bulky netbook computers are replacements for iPhones. That's what happened for me. The day I got my Eee PC 901 in July was when I more or less stopped using my iPhone as a computer.  

But a netbook with Skype and a service plan is a lot like a cell phone, but unlike Apple's offering, it runs an OS with a wealth of software and developer know-how that is wide open. There's no gatekeeper who gets to say who can and can't put whatever software they want on a netbook.  

And watch out Google, it beats Android too -- again so many more people know how to program Windows, it runs everything. For that reason I'm not running out to buy an Android phone, but I already own two netbooks. 

Another bet I'd make -- the netbooks are going to shrink to phone size. You can see the space being made in the Asus product line. They're dropping the 7-inch screens in favor of the 10-inch ones, the keyboards on the 7-inch models aren't very usable, but they'll surely have a netbook form factor the size of a cell phone that plugs into a USB port on my laptop-like netbook. And each will cost $99 with a service plan, and they've lovely computers. 

This is the future.