What a netbook is not
AMD reckons it made the right bet in choosing to go with ultrathins rather than netbooks, saying many of its ultrathins not only covered the netbook category, but also provided a significantly better experience.
Describing netbooks as "very small devices customised for web-browsing and email," at a notebook event this week, AMD executives said netbooks in their truest form were trade-offs, but that certain OEMs like Acer were pushing the boundaries with machines like the Acer Ferrari One.
The Ferrari One, which sports an 11.6in, 1,366x768 display, AMD's low-power Athlon X2 Dual Core L310 processor, 2GB DDR2 667/800MHz RAM (upgradeable to 4GB) and 250 GB hard drive may be a bit pricey for a netbook at around £400, but AMD's Leslie Sobon insists it's a first step towards a crossover category.
"Let's get ready because the lines are getting blurred," said Sobon, the firm's worldwide VP product manager. "Acer is starting that blur big time," she added.
Indeed, Acer is marketing the machine as a netbook, whilst AMD refers to it as an "ultrathin". But a netbook, according to Scott Shutter, AMD's senior manager of product marketing, "is what you define it as."
Shutter said users shouldn't have to sacrifice for a netbook experience and opined that "netbooks are a niche product and will remain as such." Of course, they haven't been quite so niche for Intel, sending the firm's little Atom chips flying off shelves and even causing concern of cannibalisation to Intel's more-powerful mobile CPUs.
But AMD reckons people are buying netbooks for all the wrong reasons, namely because they're small- and "cute-" looking. This, the company's execs say, is resulting in a lot of people becoming disillusioned and frustrated with the little laptops' capabilities.
