Speaking of Acer, it was announced that they would release a new Gateway LT1001G netbook. Just in case you did not know, Acer bought out Gateway last year and so it’s normal that the Gateway LT1001G netbook has a striking resemblance to the Acer Aspire one netbooks.

A new way to get your hands on the Acer Aspire one mini laptop was unveiled. The deal is that you could get the ultraportable notebook for $99 but there was a catch. The deal, that is a Radio Shack offer, may actually not be that much of a bad idea (See: Why The Radioshack 3G Acer Aspire One Netbook Deal Almost Sucks).

An interesting netbook bag by Voltaic that also recharges your mini notebook was mentioned while we also heard of Jolicloud, a netbook operating system from Netvibes’ founder. The race for netbook operating systems is on and it’s no wonder that it was reported that Google’s Android could be seen in netbooks.

The Android operating system is usually found in smartphones but netbooks sell more than the iPhone according to figures that were released. Maybe that’s why Google is so interested in mini portable PCs. Netbook Era was rather annoyed at those “netbooks vs iPhone” reports because they were comparing two unrelated things.

The New York Times wrote a handy guide to SSD and how they relate to netbooks. One of the things they do is improve battery life. But it seems that an  Asus Eee PC 901 netbook  powered by a 10-cell battery was another way to extend battery life.

Naturally, a few predictions were made notably the fact that netbooks were going corporate in 2009 and that the future of these ultraportable notebooks was in 10″ models as the smaller sizes are just too impractical with their tiny screens and keyboards.

Quite a few netbook reviews were documented: Zepto A12, MSI Wind U100-483JP, Asus N10Jc-A1, Fujitsu Amilo Mini Ui 3520, ASUS N10J, Gigabyte M192 and the  Averatec 1000 netbooks.

Also, quite a few new netbooks or wannabe netbooks were written about: Alpha 400 MIPS, Gateway LT1001G, Axioo PICO DJM 616, Sony VAIO VGN-TT15GNR, Sony Ericsson Xperia X1 and the XDA Flint.

More handy guides were written on how to buy the best DJ netbook and about the best netbook ever. 

As usual, the deals were  in full prominence: HP Mini 1000, Acer Aspire One, LG X110, Lenovo IdeaPad S10, and the Dell Mini 9 netbooks.

And so, those were the highlights of the past week (7th-14th December 2008). Thanks for reading us, your number one netbook blog!

The race for the de facto standard operating system is on and all developers with interesting ideas should get into it. I can say that none of the big boys such as Microsoft, Google even Ubuntu will win it because they will try to customize their already existing offering to netbooks while smaller hence more flexible will totally create something new from scratch that takes into consideration the mini laptops’ features.

Jolicloud (Mr Krim’s latest venture) and Good OS are the two cloud operating systems that are garnering attention but in the next months, we can all expect to see new players and in about two years, one will dominate à la Google becoming king and making most of the money.

All the tech bloggers and journalists can spend all of their days praising netbooks or proclaiming their uselessness as much as they want but the final rests with people who actually shelled out their hard earned money and are actively using their netbooks. That’s where the buck should stop and all the experts should just hush and lend a listening ear. 

Jeff Atwood is a software developer who decided to purchase a (pink) Acer Aspire One netbook for his wife. He played around with it and wrote about his experience hence the quote above. 

He is pretty impressed with the netbook and is hopeful about their future as they get more powerful and yet become cheaper.

Are any of the pundits, manufacturers or other industry experts paying attention to users who publicly declare their love for netbooks? Jeff Atwood has a large following. At this time of writing, there are hundreds of comments to the post.

When manufacturers released netbooks they had one thing in mind. But it turned out that the marketplace adopted them for different reasons.

I actually see a day when all web designers may be forced to create versions of their sites that are netbook friendly because these babies are selling like crazy!

In this article, I will attempt to explain what it’s all about while leaving the jargon nonsense out.

Simply put, a cloud OS is an Internet based operating system. It means that the applications that you use to perform the different computing tasks that you need to do are Internet based instead of being on your desktop.

An example that will make it easy for anyone to grasp the whole cloud OS concept is email.

Most of us have a Hotmail, Yahoo or Gmail personal email account while at work we have an Outlook or other desktop based email client. You could say that Hotmail, Yahoo and Gmail are email cloud applications because the software (email client) and the data (the actual email messages) are stored on a cloud* (a metaphor used for the Internet) instead of your desktop.

With cloud operating system, other computing tasks beyond email such as document writing and file storing can be done over the Internet and so Microsoft Word in your computer is not needed nor is an external hard drive to store your data.

What does all this mean?

Well it means that your computer does not have to be that powerful and that you do not have to store everything on a physical hard drive because everything is stored on a server somewhere.

It’s the same principle when you upload your photos to Facebook or Flickr. While most people upload their pictures to such sites to share them with friends, some (me included) store them there because they would rather keep there than on a computer. In that case, they are always accessible no matter the computer used.

Cloud operating systems help out a lot because what you are doing is being on the Internet all the time. The only software that you load up from your desktop is your browser that you need to connect to the Internet to access all your web based applications such as email, photos, music, video and yes word editing (Google Writely or Spreadsheets or Google Calendar to name a few).

Cloud OS benefit netbooks because the netbooks do not need that much power to run the browser that controls the web applications. That’s why netbook manufacturers are adopting them en masse.

They can still include slow processors as long as they can run the browsers that run the cloud applications.

I hope that this makes sense for now. If you have questions, please feel free to drop me a line at the usual contact email address. 

*Photo: notsogood [in malaysia nov18-dec4th]