More evidence that tablets are cooling netbook demand?

According to DigiTimes, both Acer and Asustek (Asus) have cleared out their existing inventory of netbooks, and are monitoring market demand before launching any new models. Intel's pricing for its new dual-core Atom N550 processor, which is $11 to $22 higher than current models, is said to be one of the factors causing the netbook vendors to be cautious.

Another big reason for caution on the part of Acer and Asustek has to be the market success of Apple's iPad and the potential impact of forthcoming tablets. I've had an Acer Aspire One for more than a year, and I've switched to an iPad. There's very little that I can do with the Acer that I can't do with the iPad, plus the iPad doesn't have to be unpacked to go through airport security, it's lighter and it feels faster. (I'm running Windows 7 on the Acer, so that may explain some of its sluggish performance.)

A year ago, the company that I was working at was pushing netbooks as more flexible substitutes for dedicated hardware eBook readers. They had limited success, even though the netbooks were often less expensive than the dedicated readers. Now that the Kindle 2 and nook are priced below $200 and are likely to fall further, netbooks have lost their price advantage. At the other end of the scale, the iPad's user experience is far better than that of netbooks. With Android and WebOS tablets likely to reach the market at lower prices than the iPad before the end of the year, the argument for netbooks is even more tenuous. That's why the leading manufacturers are holding back.

Do you need more than a netbook?

I finally got to play with a netbook today, an Acer Aspire One running Windows XP with 1GB of RAM and a 160GB hard drive, and I was impressed. As a travel computer, it would do just about everything I, or most business or personal users, need. There wasn't a live WiFi connection in the store where I was trying the Acer out, so I couldn't test the computer's performance with streaming video, and there's no DVD drive, so I'd have to rip a DVD onto a USB flash drive if I wanted to watch a movie on an airplane. To me, those are relatively minor limitations.

The Aspire One that I was looking at was priced at $399. There were bigger notebooks with much larger screens and keyboards for a couple of hundred dollars more, but for my money, a computer like the Aspire One would be an ideal travel computer, far more cost-effective than either the Mac Book Air or Lenovo X300. The Aspire One and similar computers are so cheap that they're "sacrificial"; so long as you have a good backup solution, if they break, it's often cheaper to buy a new one than to get the existing one repaired.

All that said, I probably wouldn't want to edit a webpage or run Photoshop on a netbook, but that's not what they're designed for. For the kinds of things that you're likely to do when traveling, a netbook is fine.