14 DAY TRIAL // Netbooks have not yet been written off as electronics whose time has passed, but some companies are doing more than just considering the prospect, like Samsung.
The time of low-end mobile personal computers, as they are today, may finally be nearing its end, or at least its twilight.
Though netbooks are not at all gone yet, they haven't exactly proven to be very strong competitors to tablets and even ultrabooks when it came to securing news coverage and buyers over the past year.
Then again, not very many of them have been launched lately either, though gems like the Acer Aspire One 722 did earn their attention.
That said, the time for companies to totally back out on the idea has arrived at last.
Not that anyone was actually looking forward to this, but Samsung might just be the first corporation to officially stop making netbooks.
According to Blogeee, or at least a supposed e-mail that Samsung sent them, the company will cease developing 10.1-inch netbooks once the first quarter of 2012 has passed.
“Following the introduction of our new strategy in 2012, we will discontinue our 10.1-inch (netbook) product range in Q1 2012, in favor of ultraportables (11.6 and 12 inches) and ultrabooks to be launched in 2012,” the company supposedly said.
As much as this renders both AMD and Intel chips a bit obsolete, some of them anyway, the simple matter is that netbooks won't really have many customers left once ultrabooks become actually affordable.
Also, tablets already sell for under $200, or at least 7-inch models do, so they can't really hope to compete on that front either.
No word yet on whether other companies are about to follow in Samsung's footsteps and do similar business outlet changes in 2012. If they take too long or move too fast, though, they might throw a wrench in Intel's Atom roadmap.