Wed, May 12, 2010 6:46 AM
At an investor's meeting Tuesday, Intel CEO Paul Otellini said that netbook shipments will grow more than 20% this year.
He attributes the growth to a change in buying habits: at first netbooks were seen as a second computer, but are increasingly being purchased as a primary device.
Intel's Atom processor for netbooks represented 20 percent of Intel's mobile PC processor shipments during the first quarter of 2010, according to an IDC study released last month. iSuppli last week said netbook shipments are projected to be 34.5 million units in 2010, up 30 percent from 2009. Total PC shipments are expected to be about 209.5 million units this year, an increase of 25.5 percent year-over-year.
These stats may surprise some who've been following the Morgan Stanley report suggesting that Apple's iPad has reduced interest in netbooks. But a closer look at that report reveals that the iPad's effect isn't limited to netbooks but affects a broad range of devices, even cannibalizing sales of Apple's own iPhone Touch and notebooks.
It's also worth noting that the impact of the iPad on netbooks has only reduced growth, and that growth in the netbook market remains the consistent factor since their premier in 2007 with the EeePC.
The reality of netbook success even with the advent of the iPad isn't surprising to those who've read the iPad's system requirements, which note that a Mac or PC is required to make full use of the iPad.
So what does this mean for Rev developers?
Over the years we've become accustomed to thinking of screen size as getting ever larger, and many software developers have begun to feel very confident that we could target 1024x768 as a minimum screen size to design for.
But netbooks are here and they're here to stay, so to capitalize on that growing segment it makes sense to make your layouts resizable, with a minimum useful screen size matching the netbook's WSVGA, 1024x600.
I've been reworing most of the apps I manage to make sure they work well with the shorter screens, and since the difference is only 168 pixels vertically it hasn't been too bad.
Resizable windows are the easiest of course, but we've had a few dialogs that were taller than 580 pixels (the screen size minus the Windows task bar or Ubuntu menu panel), and some of those required adjustments to work well.
But overall the process of ensuring that our software works well on netbooks has been pretty straightforward, and it's given me a good excuse to spend even more time with Ubuntu so I'm not complaining. :)
Blog Home Filed under: netbooks marketing UI
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Richard Gaskin
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