For 2008, Netbooks were big news technology-wise. This was the first year they really came onto the market. What else can 2009 be but the year they came into their own.

Gigabyte are already  leaders in the motherboard market, along with ASUS and MSI, they’ve been quietly getting on with making Netbooks for the past year. But there has been something that we’ve not quite managed that Lenovo or Sony have been able to.

It wasn’t always like that though. This time last year they released their Gigabyte Cafe. Interesting name for a Netbooks that managed to make  waves in the handheld PC market when it was first released with a compact design made for portability. The revolutionary touch screen display could be rotated 180 degrees to transform the device into a tablet PC, offering a completely different user experience. Gigabyte’s Netbooks, as a rule, have higher specifications than those of their competitors hence prices are usually $150 more than other leading brands.  At $800 Gigabyte’s Cafe Netbook didn’t come cheap.

The  will feature new Good OS Cloud operating systems. The browser looks like Google Chrome but can be installed with Windows or any other operating system.

The two other Gigabyte 10″ models will be fighting in the same market as the bigger name Netbooks out there. All three will have a more reasonable starting price of US $400 and according to Digitimes one model is set to retail at below US $300 to compete within the competitive emerging Netbook market.

Finally there are some photos of the 10 inch Acer Aspire One netbook. Although this  had all the benchmarks of an unsubstantiated rumour the pictures prove that the 10 inch exist and is near to completion.

The features include a 1.6GHz N270 or N280 Atom CPU. RAM is expected to be set at 1GB. The 160GB hard drive should be preloaded with Windows XP. In terms of connectivity the Acer One will come with with Bluetooth and Wi-Fi connections

According to the Financial Times, Netbooks have managed to fascinate Britain’s tech-savvy community so much that they are tipped to be one of the most gifted wanted products, this Christmas! So, if you feel your present laptop is just too heavy to lug around all the time and you could do with a smaller one when you’re out at the coffee shop downing lattes and blogging, now is the time to start looking.

What is a Netbook?

Shortest definition = A small, low-cost, mobile computing device designed for consuming content, rather than creating new content.

It’s interesting how after the likes of OLPC Chairman Nicholas Negopronte were laughed off for wanting to create a small inexpensive laptop which wasn’t exactly a powerhorse, Asus pioneered the ‘’small budget laptop” revolution with their EEE PC. However, it looks like Asus may find it difficult to maintain their grip over the market as Dell, HP, Acer, Lenovo and Samsung are now in the market, trying to lure consumers with a wide variety of choices…

No, you’re mistaken if you think the netbooks are just small cheap machines which run only on Linux. Agreed, the price for running on Windows is higher but that hasn’t deterred HP from offering you the HP 2133 Mini which runs on Windows Vista. I’d have thought that Microsoft should actually be quite happy that 70% of netbooks run on Windows but given their 90% dominance in PC’s, they are apparently concerned about the impact, Linux may continue to have.

Is Apple going to enter the race? Sorry, folks but looks like Mr. Jobs just ruled it out last week, saying

“We don’t know how to make a $500 computer that’s not a piece of junk, and our DNA will not let us ship that.”

Terribly upsetting but hey, maybe he’s got some uber cool gadget in the labs now. Yeah,Optimism!!!!!