No more 9" Eee PCs? What are they thinking?

Someone's got to draw the line here.

I'm really starting to get worried that the netbook phenomenon we've seen creeping into the mainstream might start bloating and turning into nothing more than overpriced sub-notebooks.

For starters, Asus just announced that it's stopping production of Eee PCs below the 10 inch form factor. WHAT? Now, I know most of you guys probably think this is a sensible thing to do: it only adds about 200 g to the weight, larger screen, larger keys and more space for a bigger battery / larger capacity hard drive. Probably worth it.

Well, I have a two points to make against this trend:

1. I own a Eee 900 and I love the fact I can get 1024 X 600 resolution on a very compact machine. One extra inch of screen size isn't that big a difference, but an extra 1.5 inches of width to accomodate that screen is. I want my netbookto be as small as possible.

2. Most 10 inchers add another 200g to the weight of the sub-1 kg 9 inchers. that's 20% extra weight and for you guys who say it's not a lot, well, 1 kg is the thresh-hold for me.

Now, I'm not saying 10 inchers are bad. Not at all. What I'm saying is I'd like to see the option for a 9 inch netbook simply because to me, this is the sweetspot between size (portability) and power (screen resolution etc.). What's disturbing me is that companies are talking about 11 incher and 12 incher netbooks with higher prices like that's the next great thing, and I starting to get the sense that pretty soon "netbooks" will no longer be that cheap, supplementary surf-the-net computer.

They'll be bloated, underperforming notebooks with small screens. Please, don't destroy this beloved category.

Disclosure: I do PR work for Lenovo who make the excellent Lenovo S10 (a 10 incher by the way). This post has nothing to do with them.