[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by ApK

But I'd be surprised if a device with a larger screen, keyboard and touchpad was considered a "tablet" which is what was under discussion, since that form factor is a key differentiator.

I wouldn't. We're seeing an increasing number of devices with touch screens in form factors where the case includes a keyboard and touchpad. Mate it with the case, and it's a netbook. Remove it, and the device functions as a tablet.

And really, what about it being "Android" per se made the netbook any more useful than the OS that came on it, be it Windows or Linux? I'd think that with out a touch screen, and with more screen real estate, running Android would be more of a novelty rather than particularly more useful than a "real" computer OS, as we're calling it.

The driving factor has been the fact that hardware gets steadily smaller, faster, and cheaper.

My first home computer was a Unix machine - an AT&T 3B1. It was the brother of the AT&T UNIX-PC, sold in the days when AT&T was still in the computer business. It was made for AT&T on an OEM basis by workstation vendor Convergent Technologies (now part of Unisys), and was an AT&T attempt to compete on the desktop with the IBM-PC. It had a bit-mapped GUI console, with a 10mhz Motorola 68010 CPU, 2MB RAM by default, expandable to 4MB, and a 40 or 72 [i]MB[/b] MFM hard drive. It would boot and run a Convergent port of AT&T Unix System V Release 2, a full multitasking, multi-user OS, in 1 MB of RAM and perform acceptably. (I had a client back then supporting four users on dumb terminals and driving a printer off a 3B1 with 72MB drive and 3MB RAM, running a specialized distribution management application.) I still have the 3B1.

A PC clone running MS-DOS was a later addition, with a 10mhz NEC V20 CPU, two 360KB 5.25" floppies, a Hercules video card driving an Amber monitor, two Seagate ST-225 20MB hard drives, and an AST 6-Pak addon card with a megabyte of expansion RAM, divided between a 512KB RAMdisk, a 256MB disk cache, and 256MB of EMS memory for apps that could use it.

Next step was a 33mhz 386 machine with 8MB RAM and a 2 GB hard drive running Windows 3.1. The 3B1 ran rings around it.

I still have and use a Palm TX PDA (replacing a Tapwave Zodiac 2) Both devices have 128MB RAM, 480x360 color screens, a 200 mhz ARM CPU, and 4GB of external storage. (A 4GB SD card for the TX, and two 2GB cards for the Zodiac, which has two card slots.) They have faster processors, more RAM, and more storage than the earlierr devices, in a form factor that fits in a pocket.

This has been the trend for years. As hardware gets smaller, faster, and cheaper, functions migrate to smaller devices because they can. Going forward, I largely expect every cell phone to be a smartphone, simply because it can be. The old distinctions between dumb phone, feature phone and smartphone were largely driven by hardware costs, and what could be done at a particular price point. As hardware costs drop, those distinctions increasingly blur. Today's feature phone is yesterday's high end smartphone. Along similar lines, the distinctions between PC and tablet are blurring,

It doesn't quite exist yet, but I expect to see a device in a smartphone form factor, with enough power that it can be the main computing device. Plug it into a dock with large monitor, keyboard, mouse, and connection to network storage, and voila! You have a capable desktop machine. There will still be a market for bigger iron with more power and capacity, but the phone sized unit will do the the job that most home machines do now.

I agree that we are going to see a convergence of device types, but I don't know that their killer OS will be Android in any form or flavor. In fact, if forced to go one way or the other, I'd bet against it. I'd predict there will be something totally new evolving out lessons learned in Linux, Android, and iOS.

A main form of convergence I'm seeing is in OSes. The driver is "The user runs the same OS on every device they use." Windows exists for desktop and laptop, a WindowsRT variant for ARM based tablets, and Windows phone for smartphones. Apple has iOS for smartphones and tablets, and OS/X for desktops and laptops, but I expect them to converge, and when the dust settles, everything Apple makes will run iOS.

Linux is still fragmented, but Android is the leading edge of convergence there. Android was originally developed to be a smartphone OS, and the design was carefully modular, so that OEMs could tailor the image to their hardware and intended use cases. I got the Android SDK back when, looked, and said "I wonder how long it will be before we see devices running Android that aren't phones? The answer was not long at all.

There is an early port of Android to X86 out there, intended to be used in things like desktops and laptops, and there is no reason Android couldn't power one.

A new OS based on the lessons learned from Linux, Android, and iOS is possible, but I consider it unlikely. Actually developing an OS is time consuming and expensive. It would require a deep pool of engineering talent, and deep pockets to fund the effort. Who would do it, when the others already exist, and why would they bother?

Tablets have overwhelmed the consumer market segment that the netbook was hoping to conquer, and rightfully so, I think.

I pretty much agree. They can do most of the same things, in a cheaper and lighter form factor. I have a netbook. A tablet may well replace it.
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Dennis