The Internet experience has split into two in the worst way possible. The mobile internet is no longer a subset of the ‘Full’ Internet; it is now a separate world offering features that the desktop just can’t offer and the worst thing is that there isn’t a single device and operating system out there that spans the two Internet worlds. In this article I look at the feature-set of the ‘Full Internet Experience’ and how those features impact netbooks and other ‘mobile’ PCs.

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Back in August 2009 I took a look at some of the keywords in mobile computing. My top tips at that time were Moblin and Maemo. Obviously I was wrong on that one as both of those two keywords disappeared! My heart was in the right place though and those two keywords merged into another one, MeeGo, that I will also tip as an important one for the next 3-year timeframe.

MID continues to be a difficult term to search for. EeePC and PocketPC continue to decline. iPhone continues to dwarf everything else. Nothing much changed there but the updates I wanted to give you today are based around the ‘netbook’ and ‘android’ keywords. When we last looked at the graph, Android was just overtaking Netbook. Both keywords were on the rise.

6 months later and things are looking quite different…

I’ve removed the search term ‘windows mobile’ and you can clearly see that search volume for netbooks has dropped-off dramatically while Android continues to rise.

Christmas will have caused the peak you see in the netbook graph but look how it was dropping before that and look to where the level has dropped since Christmas. If the graph falls further we could be leaving the peak of the mass-market stage for netbooks and from that point on it becomes a scramble to sell to the remaining adopters. Prices will drop, marketing will get heavy-handed (the 1.8Ghz and DDR3-capable Atom CPU’s appear to be an effort to assist marketing teams in that effort) and there’s a chance that quality will drop as cheaper builds flood the market. There’s also a chance that someone steps in to re-energise the market and that some effort goes into tailoring the netbook experience for different types of user. If the Nvidia ION 2 platform and rumors of dual-core Atom processors for netbooks is anything to go by then there’s every chance that the processor, screen, GPU, memory and feature restrictions will all be dropped. In that case we can hope for some nice high-end netbooks, mobile-focused netbooks, gaming, video other focus areas. To be honest, neither of these moves will really help. One is just an indication that netbooks really are entering the ‘laggard’ segment; the other an indication that netbooks are merging into laptops. It’s highly possible that both of these moves will happen at the same time.

Watch that graph. Where are we moving to next? Tomorrow I’ll be posting an article that looks closely at the possible death of the desktop OS for mobile consumers and professionals which is another reason that the netbook keyword could be on the way out.

Does anyone remember the excitement about the HTC Shift that resulted in a series of total showstoppers that caused it to fade quickly from public view?  Battery life, screen resolution and (slow) operating system were my personal deal-breakers and if there’s one thing I’ve learnt from 3 years of product blogging it’s that people are very quick to get excited about a product en masse but when it comes to the crunch, there’s often a show stopper that kills interest, en masse.

The Crunchpad has been at number 1 in the UMPCPortal charts for about a month now and because we’re not particularly highly ranked for Crunchpad search terms it indicates that there’s rather a lot of traffic out there for it. In fact if you look at Google Trends you see that searches for Crunchpad are in the same ballpark as for the terms ‘UMPC’ and the popular UMPC brand ‘Viliv.’

The Crunchpad is clearly getting a good number of eyes and if it’s well executed it should sell well but the lessons of the HTC Shift have to be remembered. Battery life and operating system are the two main issues here.

Two years ago we wanted a 3hr minimum battery life on our portable devices. Now, that expectation is up to 5hrs which is going to be a tough call. It is possible with a well engineered Menlow-based design (probably not with a typical netbook-platform design) but then there’s the issue of software. Creating an end-user Linux build is extremely hard work. Whatever OS is chosen though, if Firefox takes more than 7 seconds to open and page loads average more than 10 seconds, its ‘slow.’ The iPhone 3GS is in the 10-15 second range for average page load times now so there’s no excuse for slow page loads.

Finally there’s the price. Mike Arrington, the owner of the company has set a lot of expectations down at the $200-$300 level so if he misses that target by much he’s lost a lot of momentum. With well-built 8.9” 1KG Asus 900’s going for under $200 there’s a lot of competition.

I would love to see the Crunchpad succeed and for thousands of people to have a portable touch-based web solution available but I worry about the lessons we all learned from the HTC Shift.

HTC Shift details and links

Crunchpad details and links