Netbooks are becoming ultrabooks

Contrary to what many say, netbooks are not even slightly close to extinction, since despite the decline in sales in the U.S. and Europe due to the growth of the tablet, netbook sales continue to grow in the poorest countries (even in Brazil) and it is expected that this trend will continue at least until the end of 2012.

Netbooks continue to be the ducklings made in terms of performance. Even with the release of Cedar Trail was little change in relation to performance, as he continues to maintain the same basic architecture with two cores and clocks similar to today's chips. The only major improvement is the inclusion of 1080p H.264 video decoding in hardware, a faster GPU and a lower power consumption. In terms of raw processing, the Atom-based netbooks, 2012 will not be much different from 2011.

On the other hand, netbooks are gaining on another front is also important for the price. We have models on the market approaching the home of U.S. $ 200 and $ 600 in Brazil, which is cheaper than a tablet quality, while maintaining flexibility in relation to systems, applications and peripherals to a PC provides, not to mention the combination of good old keyboard and trackpad or USB mouse.

The changing market has also led to another trend, which is an alignment between netbooks and ultrabooks, a natural change, since the best way to value a product of $ 300 is to make it look like one of U.S. $ 1000.

Strict standards in relation to the Intel Atom hinder such close proximity, so many manufacturers are choosing to create designs based on AMD's Brazos platform, which allows greater flexibility in relation to the formats. A good example of this new breed is the Eee PC 1225B , which offers a 11.6 screen:

It is based on Fusion E450 dual-core 1.65GHz (1.0GHz or the C60, according to version), with a Radeon HD 6320 GPU, 2 or 4 GB of DDR3 memory, magnetic hard drive up to 750 GB and a and 6-cell battery 56Wh, with a promised range of up to 6 hours. The ports include HDMI output and a USB 3.0 port, complementing the two USB 2.0 and card reader.

It provides a setting much higher than most netbooks, with a total weight of 1.44 kg, which is still within the portable. The launch price in Europe is € 349.In a direct conversion that would give about $ 460, but remember that taxes in Europe are much higher than in the U.S., and the products usually end up costing about the same in U.S. dollars to Euros when I finally released there. If the trend continues, it is likely that it costs at around $ 1000 here.

In summary, we have a better performance, a larger screen and a more comfortable keyboard in exchange for a small increase in price and weight.Although not perfect, this combination is a good middle ground between netbooks and ultrabooks, I personally find quite interesting.