Welcome back.

I was thinking about all the devices that we need to purchase and maintain - it gets expensive. Beyond the fiscal concerns, one of things that turns me off about netbooks is the idea of having another device to maintain and try to synchronize.

Obviously that will become easier with time and as cloud personalization services emerge, but for now, it is a pain. Having two pc's sounds like a pain to me, but I have already gotten used to having a smart phone. So why not have the smart phone be your netbook? Smartphones are now pretty much as powerful as many netbooks, and with the rapid pace of innovation in smartphones there is no reason why the phones coming out this year should not be able to do everything that one should desire from a netbook.

Your Kids Would Love It (or Their Parents Might)

What I would like to see is a docking station for a smartphone that looks like a netbook, but derives all of its intelligence from the smartphone. This would be, essentially, just a keyboard and monitor. It would be a great reason to save costs and save time from having to administer what I call YAD (yet another device). Many parents already pay for smartphone and mobile internet for their kids so it would be a great way of providing a form factor that would allow them to productively do homework with the investment they have already made.

Assuming the smartphone already has mobile internet, that is one less charge to worry about than getting yet another device. One thing I learned in Tech Commercialization school is that if you ever think you have a good idea, look it up and if it really is a good idea, someone has already thought about it ... maybe they haven't successfully commercialized the concept, but almost always you can find similar concepts. So I did a very brief search and found that there have been some attempts at this already including one that is on the market today.

This device called the OLO looks really cool. Unfortunately I can't find any updates on the OLO since late 2008, so it may be dead. Another attempt at this that is on the market today is the Celio Redfly. The Redfly has not done that well which I feel is because it was premature, it looks like the device hasn't had any major updates since its launch in early 2008. It also lacks tight integration with OS and handset manufacturers. Now is the perfect time to develop a product like this ... customer demand demonstrates people want more power on there smartphones and new innovations are delivering smartphones with real computing power.

If Google hasn't already ruined their reputation in hardware with the Nexus One, this would be a Great way for Google to launch their rumored netbooks ... imagine being able to buy a top of the line, sexy smartphone that also doubled as a good, functional netbook for less than the cost of an iPhone. What do you guys think?

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