I believe netbooks, at least in their current state, are a temporary product category. As technology progresses and manufacturing costs decline, most laptops will gain solid-state hard drives and decline in weight—why wouldn’t they? The netbook’s other defining characteristic, their size, is not diminutive enough to impact a user’s way-of-life as dramatically as an iPod Touch (or equivalent device).

What keeps me enamored with these devices is the opportunity for simplicity. As we wait for Apple, Palm, Google and RIM to strike the right balance of openness and usefulness (while pleasing the carrier overlords), netbooks offer an open, mobile-conscious playground for purposeful and unique experiences.

These experiences can (and should) be more than application launchers augmenting long-established operating systems, solutions which are heavy-handed in execution and obtuse for an audience of mobile, web-centric users. While the original ASUS Eee PC and Ubuntu Netbook Remix interfaces were steps in the right direction, Moblin and Jolicloud are far more exciting.

Moblin is an open source, Linux-based operating system founded by Intel and optimized for their nearly ubiquitous Atom processor. It’s interface is simple, attractive, immediate and shockingly fast. Read the rest of this entry…