Flash in the pan

Some of those problems may be solved with time. OLED display technology is presently much too expensive to put in cheap netbooks, but when its price falls, it will offer better screens that need less power. Chipset technology improves apace, and even cheap netbook CPUs will eventually be able to handle HD video content without choking. Even the build quality will improve, although this may be at the expense of pricing.

Other problems with netbooks are inherent and may never be solved. Input is never going to be as good as a laptop, since keyboards and trackpads will always be smaller and less comfortable on a netbook. Connectivity - be it USB ports, external monitor connections or optical drives for DVDs or Blu-ray discs - will always suffer on a netbook. Meanwhile, the actual functionality of the netbook as a communication device will always be trumped by modern smartphones, which benefit from an external screen, a pocketable form factor and an always-on 3G connection.

Herein lies the basic flaw with the dream of the netbook as the "one computer per person" device that will unify the market - that device already exists. In fact, two of those devices already exist - the laptop and the smartphone. In recent years, laptops have grown smaller, lighter, more connected - while smartphones have become more powerful, sprouted bigger screens and better input interfaces, and started talking to the Internet. Netbooks find themselves bridging an increasingly narrow gap in the middle, neither as portable and connected as a smartphone, nor as powerful and useful as a laptop.

From a gaming perspective, it's clear that smartphones are an important emerging platform for game experiences. Laptops, meanwhile, are the standard platform for existing casual game experiences, as well as being popular devices for many more traditional games - especially MMOGs.

Publishers are still working to nail down the most successful strategy to address both of those platforms, and if anything, the buzz around netbooks has been a distraction from the important business of making sure that the growing number of people gaming on their laptops are catered for. It's all very well to talk about a netbook revolution in the future, but right now, how many games are released with a control system optimised for a trackpad or graphics designed for a 13" or 15" screen?

I simply find it hard to believe that in between those two important, rapidly growing markets, there's a sufficiently large gap in which a whole new platform can emerge - let alone become dominant.

Fascinating experiments by Intel and Microsoft with the UMPC platform, a hardware and software solution aimed at bridging the gap between laptops and phones, have fizzled into nothingness - largely killed off by the realisation that smartphones would inherit that market all by themselves. Netbooks, hampered by design constraints and cursed with cheap build quality and weak build quality, their market squeezed from both sides by rapidly improving phones and laptops, seem like an unlikely candidate to inherit the earth.