I often spoke up against idiotic screen size / resolution limits that render Netbooks close to useless, yet the de facto industry standard appears to be 1024 x 600. What’s wrong with that? Well, nothing, unless you plan to browse, or in fact interact with web sites, since websites today are designed at a resolution of 1024×768. Passive reading might be OK, but try to work on an interactive website, where the action buttons disappear, or just write a blog post where you have to click both above and under the editor area – the continuous vertical scrolling on Netbooks whose touchpad area typical leaves a lot to desire is a major inconvenience.
I can’t be the only user who find this a pain, and I can’t believe PC manufacturers would not receive similar feedback. They probably do, but the problem is, they are not acting in an entirely free market: the Intel – Microsoft duopoly can dictate the terms. Now Reghardware in the UK reports Intel may be lifting the restriction placed on Atom N-based netbooks: manufacturers will now be allowed to build netbooks with higher res 10” displays – the ones that actually place the “Net” in the Netbook. (Reghardware’s source is actually a Taiwanese manufacturer site, which until recently I would not have been able to read, but thanks to Google translate we can now all read Chinese…)
So the good news is, we’ll likely see 1366×768, 1200×800 ..etc resolutions soon. The bad news is, they are still limited to 10” size. Great for travel… but I admit I am as ancient as Ben is (actually, a lot more, but psst! ) and can not look at the microscopic characters you get when squeezing hi-res into a 10” screen for hours without major eye-sore. So that’s the next obstacle the industry needs to deal with. Hi-res in a 12” screen, (OK, 11.6 will do) and we have a decent netbook that can actually be used for work. Now, add to it SSD instead of a hard disk, a sub $500 price, and I’m running to buy…
Related posts:
- Screen Size: The Next Plan to Cripple Netbooks in Order to Protect a Dying Market
- Should You Redesign Your Website to 800×600 – Or Wait For Netbook Makers to Wake Up and Give Us Decent Screens?
- Confessions of a Gen X-er – Screen Size Matters
- Netbook or Notebook? It’s Not Only About Size.
CloudAve is sponsored by Salesforce.com and Workday.