This probably doesn’t come as a surprise to any, but netbooks are officially goners now. This has been a long-time coming. As ultrabooks and tablets have eaten into netbook marketshare, Asus and Acer remained the only two brands that were keeping the netbook market alive.

Now Asus and Acer confirm that 2013 will be the last year, with no plans to make any further models. The companies will instead focus on convertibles, hybrids, ultrabooks and tablets.

The ending of an era. Netbooks gained popularity as quickly as they fell. So what happened? Probably the biggest reasons for the end of netbooks is that profit margins were never great for manufacturers when it came to netbooks, whereas tablets and other mobile computing devices have proven much more lucrative. Demand has also gone done.

Sure, some niche users need a highly-portable device with a real keyboard, but many consumers have moved from netbooks to tablets. So what about those that want a smaller notebook device and don’t want to pay much for it?

At this point, your best bet is probably to look towards Chromebooks, if you have a way to provide an always-on connection and don’t mind cloud-based apps. There is also the possibility of using a low-end notebook, but they are generally quite a bit bulkier than netbooks ever were.

Will you miss netbooks? Do you still use one, or have you moved on to other devices like tablets instead?

[ source ]

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In keeping with the Duracell Smart Power Initiative, the adapter draws less than .5W of electricity when plugged into an outlet and not in use. Depending on the netbook’s power requirement, the adapter automatically switches from 12V to 19V to ensure the correct and safe amount of voltage. The downside of it all? It will cost you $45 from Amazon, about a quarter the price of most netbooks. This would make a good “generic replacement” but at that price it wouldn’t make too much sense to “upgrade” your current netbook power adapter to this.

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Intel X25-V Value SATA SSD priced at $125 wholesale.

Intel has begun shipping the latest edition to their high-performance solid-state drives (SSDs) lineup, the Intel X25-V Value SATA SSD. It’s quick, small, durable and costs nearly 25 times the price of current magnetic platter harddrives, but when speed, ruggedness and durability are key, money isn’t everything.

The SSD market is quite small at the moment, this is due to the high cost per gigabyte, making it more of a high-end addon for performance-sensitive devices such as servers, high-end netbooks, laptops, smartbooks, and gaming computers.   According to Intel, these drives are roughly 4 times faster than existing 7200RPM harddrives, giving users faster boot times and performance as opposed to larger storage.

The drive would be best used as a boot drive, “with 40GB of boot drive capacity, a user could load the SSD with the Microsoft Windows 7 operating system, Microsoft Office applications and their favorite gaming application, such as Dragon Age: Origins, and experience up to 43 percent faster overall system performance or 86 percent improvement in their gaming experience.” Intel said in their press release.

A secondary storage drive would then be added to the system for backups, documents, movies, music and other files intended to be accessed on occasion, but not cruicial to the operating environment.

The Intel X25-V is priced at $125 at the wholesale level, which is fair considering their reputation. But with competitors growing fast in the SSD market, who knows how long that price will last.

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On Thursday, Trinity Audio Group Inc., makers of the Indamixx Portable Internet Radio Station, announced they are expanding their line with Indamixx Portable Studio on a USB stick.

With a 14 minute install the Indamixx USB stick turns your netbook and notebooks into an affordable, portable audio recording studio.

The Indamixx USB will be introducing Renoise, a Tracker based Digital Audio Workstation (DAW).  The creative director, Ronald Stewart, stated that “through a strategic licensing agreement, the Indamixx USB Version features the availability of Renoise. Renoise is one of the most advanced music production applications I’ve seen in years. Renoise is much more than a Tracker it’s a ‘Super Tracker’ and we are excited to have this addition to the Indamixx lineup,”

Production tools and software applications are designed with their classic Metal Design look.  Renoise – Super Tracker is included and will feature Transmission 3.1 Real Time OS; 2G; LinuxDSP, an exquisite ‘suite’ of mastering plugins and effects; ArdourXchange, Pro Tools compatible protocol; Ardour, a digital audio workstation; Mixxx – digital DJ; a hydrogen drum machine; 350 classic sample and scratches; over 260 Plugins / effects; IDJC – an internet radio station; a demo version of energy XT2; VST Host;  Rhythmbox music player; a Brasero CD Burner; Skype and Firefox;  complimentary software support and it’s made in the U.S.A.

And as an added bonus, a special ‘Wear Your Upgrade’ t-shit that has your unique  Indamixx USB Version upgrade code printed right on the shirt, lol.

Available at Indamixx.com for only $149.00 and includes the shirt, bonus!

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This new operating system will presumably be installed on a variety of portable devices, like MIDs and netbooks, giving a lighter weight approach to computing than Windows XP or Windows 7. You can tell that it’s very much cloud-based too, since all the email is routed through Gmail and so on.

For Chrome OS, Google is focusing on speed, simplicity, and security. The goal is to have it be “blazingly fast, basically instant-on.” It should take seven seconds to the log-in screen and another three to log into your application. The Chrome browser will be even faster on Chrome OS, because it will effectively act as the portal to everything else.

That’s because there will be no native applications for Chrome OS. Instead, every application is a web application. All of the data is in the cloud, so Google can update these apps, like Google Docs, without touching your computer at all. The same can be said about security updates and so on, just like the current Chrome browser experience.

This seems to offer some major advantages over conventional operating systems, but it does mean that you need to be connected to the Internet to do almost anything. Then again, you probably don’t do much when you’re not connected anyhow.

Check out the video below for an explanation of Chrome OS straight from the Google horse’s mouth.

Source: TC

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