Tablets killed the netbook store

A recent study by Forrester claims that in two years time tablets will surpass the sales of netbooks.
So how is it that netbooks, an enormous success over the past two years, will lose the battle to tablets?  And why should tablets, which have actually been around for some time already – although they only gained popularity with the iPad – gain such a boost?

Back at the tail end of 2007 the first netbook was announced by Asus, dubbed the Eee 701.
It was a major hit for two reasons – it was cheap and it did what all mainstream users needed, to surf the web and answer emails.
Just a year before, Microsoft, Intel and Samsung had unveiled an ambitious project codenamed “project origami” UMPC (Ultra Mobile PC) or Tablets, but unlike the netbooks, “project origami” was a failure because the devices were expensive and overloaded with features.
It did, however, catch the eye of Steve Jobs who immediately started work on the iPad, something he recently admitted to the WSJ.
So what is going to make the “switch” and turn the situation upside down from netbooks to tablets?
Well, the first thing that may turn the tables is that netbooks slowly seem to be losing their original purpose, from small, cheap machines able to surf the web and going towards bigger, more expensive models which are still not powerful enough to be proper laptops.
Tablets on the other hand seem to be picking up where netbooks left off, offering users a compact, lightweight way to consume content and surf the Internet.
Tablets don’t need to be costly, memory hungry devices running touch versions of Vista or Windows 7, instead, they are aiming at being simple to use, one-click to surf and one second power on/off machines.
Linux based operating systems like Android, iOS and MeeGo have made the above really quite attainable already. Also, with handset makers like Nokia joining the tablet building fray, the best of both mobile and PC should be about to converge.
So will netbooks lose the battle to tablets? In some ways yes, tablets will probably become the main tool to surf the web, answer some emails and watch some videos. Netbooks will just have to come a distant second.