Dell have recently entered the netbook arena, with the Mini 9, and today we are seeing another entrant, the Mini 12. APC Magazine have got a great review of the 12, but it raises some questions in my mind. What actually defines a netbook?

Is it size, is it weight, is it portability, is it battery life?

Ever since Asus launched the Eee, I’ve been fascinated with these little computers, and to tell you the truth, my old Acer Aspire has played second fiddle since I got the Eee. Considering they both have similair specs, except for screen/keyboard size, the Eee just performs better. So what am I really asking you guys to comment on? In the image above, I see a net book and a small laptop, one is mobile, and one is inconvenient.

One of the things that I refer back to, as a punctuation mark, is the release of the Mac Book Air, incredibly thin, incredibly light, only 2 inches smaller than my desktop replacement laptop, in that you have weight reduction without a huge display reduction. Possibly the air was the inspiration for the current netbook supremacy, in mobile computing, but it is not the defining device, in this massively aggressive market.

From mobile phones, to mid’s, to netBooks, to laptops to UMPC’s how do we know what we are looking at? Even the Jobs reckons the iPhone is a qualified netbook!

So my conundrum is, it’s bigger than a handheld, it’s not a mobile phone, it’s a fully functional computer, it fits in a smaller gadget bag than I’ve carried before, I carry no accessories/peripherals with it.   Except for a USB wireless modem, I need nothing else to be mobile computing with my Eee.

So what constitutes a netbook? I’m a little confused as to what fit’s this definition !

CNetNews