More netbooks sold in Q3 than iPhones

Netbooks are increasing in popularity because of their versatile form factor. Size matters, mobility matters and having a decent sized keypad sure beats having a tiny touchscreen. Netbooks offer an average 9 inch display -- providing a good compromise between portability and efficiency. It’s small enough to fit on a coffee table while eating breakfast in a café, and large enough to include a usable QWERTY keyboard Competition on the hardware level is now just starting to evolve in cool user experience features (just as it did with mobile phones). Key to the continued success of netbooks is ensuring a rich user experience.
Netbooks are NOT laptops and it’s important for netbook manufacturers to make this distinction. While sales of netbooks are on the rise – chances are that users who think they are getting a laptop will end up being disappointed. Today, Netbook usability is somewhat lacking. Netbook form factor and operating systems are mostly copied as-is from laptops. And laptop manufacturers originally copied laptops from desktop computers instead of re-designing them according to the changed use cases. Because competition with technical features has quickly reached a saturation point, it’s important for netbook manufacturers to pay extra attention to the Netbook user experience. This is an extremely strategic opportunity for differentiation, and an especially good opportunity for mobile operators to provide users with a branded product that has been tailored to meet their needs and offers readily-configured applications to access the operator’s services.

You have a good point here where performance is concerned. I bought an ultra-portable laptop late last year, and used it for almost a year. Unfortunately, while the battery life was fantastic, the slower 1.03GHz processor was seriously impeding my productivity.

What I thought interesting is that I am not a 'heavy' user in that sense. I basically switch between only three applications in the course of my work - Word, Firefox, and Outlook. No photo or video editing. Yet I do open a LOT of browser windows as I research a story, which - despite the presence of an ad-blocker, was sufficient to slow the laptop down to a crawl. I wonder how netbooks will compare.