DISQUS

This position is very dangerous for ASUS. They may get squeezed between netbooks with ION from other makers on the high end, and by ARM based netbooks on the low end.

If the price of ION based netbooks fall enough to make them as cheap as intel based ones ASUS loses out. If the performance of ARM based netbooks is sufficient to rival Atom/intel based ones ASUS lose out also.

I think that one of the issues is that a lot of "Netbook" manufactures tend to push mini-laptops instead of real netbooks.
The original EEEPC 701 with its small screen and 4 GB SSD was not suitable for windows: not enough storage, screen too small etc... But it was cheap and ideal for mobile surfing, at true Netbook.
Now most manufacturer are producing mini laptops with 10 inch screens and hard disk. The customers expectation for these is to have a full laptop functionality in a smaller package, not Netbook functionality, and a such a Linux OS designed for Netbooks is not successfull. Manufacturers should bundle a full blown Ubuntu with these instead of Xandros or Linpus.
I think Linuxes (and android) will make a comeback when manufacturers start again to release real Netbooks bases on the ARM architecture: light inexpensive machines designed for surfing.
Its all a question of semantics: what do you consider a Netbook? If a netbooks is a atom base computer with an SSD and a 7 to 9 inch screen, then I am sure the Linux market share is quite high, but then the overal Netbook market share is smaller.

No, I probably wouldn't pay the price of a full home edition on a netbook. An OS shouldn't cost more than 10% of the price of the computer it is sold with, so that woulds make a price point of around $30 for netbooks. At that price level it will probably be Linux or starter edition, but with the limitations of starter I would probably go Linux.

The problem with the 7 inch netbooks is that because of the speakers they are almost as big as 9 inch netbooks, which removes the big incentive of having a 7 inch screen. If Asus released a real 7 inch netbook weighting less than 2 pounds with no moving parts and decent battery life it would probably be a success.

I live in Europe (Belgium) and these potential surcharges on mobile broadband are indeed the norm here. Actually, getting a 5 GB cap on mobile broadband is extremely generous by European standards. To give you an idea by my provider offers 3 plans: the entry level data plan offers 10 MB (yes MEGAbytes) per month for like 7$, the medium data plan offers 200 MBs (again MEGAbytes) for around $12, and the top end plan offers 2 full GBs and cost around $30. This cost is in addition of your voice plan.

For the first 2 plans (10 Mb & 200 Mb month) any traffic beyond the quota is charger $3 per MB (again, yes $3 per MEGAbyte of data). People on the 2 GB plan that go beyond the allocated bandwith only pay $0.12 per MB).
So if you have one of the small plans and you download 1 GB of data you can easily get a bill in the thousand of $.
This has always been like that and is the reason why very few people use mobile data for anything beyond checking mail and light surfing. Even on the big plan people know that applications like web radio and Youtube should be used in moderation if at all.

This price and usage difference between mobile internet and real broadband is something of which everybody is aware because this is VERY clearly stated in the pricing structure. Operators have realised that if someone isn't aware of this and go mad whit his mobile internet, they tend to refuse to pay the big bill that comes afterward. An operator that puts these things in the fine print is just stupid.

I agree that the SUSE build of the MSI Wind was pretty awful. there were localization problems and wireless card driver issues. If it's not a problem for people able to install their own distros or compile their own drivers, I can understand how it may bring a non technical customer to bring it machine back. Dell's ubuntu builds on the other hand have a pretty good reputation.

This 3 apps limitation sucks big time.

What I see here is that Microsoft refuses to realise that if they could sell an OS for $100 when a PC cost $1000, they can't continue to do that when a PC is costing $300!

This is nothing but an attempt by MS to sell a practically unusable OS to force unsuspecting customers to "upgrade" to a version much too expensive compared to the hardware they bought.

Consumer won't pay $400 for a Windows netbook when the same is available for $300 with Linux, So now they will sell the Windows netbook with "starter" for $320 and then charge $80 for the upgrade when the user realise the limitations of the software. this means that most people will pay a lot more for their OS than what they intended.

Unless the limitation is very clearly advertised this borders on fraud and will probably end up with a class action like the "ready for Windows Vista" debacle.

Living in Europe, I can see several factor leading to this:

First here these machines are sold not only in computer stores, but also in cellphones stores eager to expand their lineup. Even if most netbooks don't come with 3G capabilities yet a lot of cellphone stores have expanded into portable consumer electronics such as mp3 players and digital camera, now they added netbooks too and are promoting them heavily.

Second factor is the fact that desktop Linux is somewhat more popular in Europe than in the US, and many Netbooks came with Linux preinstalled, which attracted quite a lot of people not willing to pay for a windows licence.

Third there is the fact that broadband is widely availlable in Europe, often in the form "triple play" packages bundling internet access, digital TV and phone calls. Some people took these offer mainly for the TV and phone services, but given the low price and unobtrusiveness of netbooks are now willing to invest in a 300€ machine just to surf the net and send a few emails.

There are also a few minor factors such as the fact that Europeans are more ready to accept lesser known asian brands (acer for exemple was much better established in Europe than in the US, even before the netbook craze started), the fact that some like MSI released their netbook in Europe before the US etc...

I don't think we need one standard Linux distro for notebooks, but manufactures should stay with major, well supported distros like ubuntu, mint, opensuse, fedora, mandriva etc...

These are usually polished ans supported enough so that new users don't get lost too much.

If you consider that here in Belgium Asus only started selling in brick and mortar shop toward the end of June it is feasible. They are in fact only starting to sell to the average (non IT) consumer.

J'avoue que je suis assez impressioné par la video de Linpus linux: ca à l'air d'être une bonne base, intuitif d'utilisation, mais avec des manques au niveau software.

Ceci créee une inquiètude: Y a t il des dépots préconfigurés qui permettent de rajouter du software linux? L'absence de GIMP est un problème majeur si l'on veux retoucher ses photos de vacances! De même pour une machine connectée multimedia l'absence de Vuse et de Miro sont peu pardonables.

Que ces softs ne soient pas installés par défaut sur un disque SSD de taille limitée est compréhensible, mais acer devrait fournir la possibilité d'installer ces softs facilement pour les utilisateurs qui en ont l'usage.