It’s fair to say Samsung have been at the forefront of innovation in the netbook market. They’re constantly pushing out new designs, new ideas, and – importantly – new features that genuinely improve what netbooks can do for us.
If the prototypes they’re currently showing off are anything to go by, it looks like they’re about to do it again with AMOLED. (“AMO who?”) …
Here’s a graph showing the number of searches for the word ‘netbook’ in Google over the last 12 months:
What does this say? Well, the big peak just before point ‘A’ was Christmas last year. Then things went flat for a while. Then around July things started to pick up. And now, at the start of November, we’re already seeing as many searches for netbooks as we were at Christmas last year.
It’s been 18 months since netbooks started selling in large numbers in the UK so we thought we’d take a look at what’s selling now.
Here are the 3 current biggest sellers:
Who says Microsoft never get anything right? Well… quite a lot of people.
[photo by bfishadow]
But in this case they’ve done something great: Released a (fairly) simple tool allowing netbook owners to download Windows 7, drop it onto a USB drive, and upgrade their netbook straight from that.
Why’s that so good? Well prior to this, you had to buy a DVD writer, or fiddle about in some very complicated ways to try and upgrade.
You could download Windows 7 direct to your netbook and run it direct from the hard drive. But, as you would be upgrading the Operating System from within itself, things could get very, very messy.
While not UK-specific, this is definitely interesting for netbook fans. The Windows 7 launch date of October 22nd has had virtually every laptop manufacturer rushing to get their W7 netbooks ready.
Did they make it?
So just what is the average person looking for in a netbook? Well, we have no idea, but we did put together this fancy picture:
Where did this come from?
In the second quarter of 2008, global netbook sales reached $845-million (around £525m). In the second quarter of 2009, they reached a massive $3,072-million (around £2,000m!)
That’s an increase of over 250% and means well over 1 in 10 laptops sold was a netbook. Check out the chart below for a full breakdown:
Just a couple of years ago, you’d be very glad to get your hands on a laptop with battery life pushing 3 hours.
Recently, Samsung announced their Samsung N140 Netbook boasting 11+ hours battery life.
Imagine what a game-changer infinite batteries would be? Never gonna happen? Well The Register, Crunchgear et al are reporting on the invention of a nuclear battery.