I often spoke up against idiotic screen size / resolution limits that render Netbooks close to useless, yet the de facto industry standard appears to be 1024 x 600. What’s wrong with that?  Well, nothing, unless you plan to browse, or in fact interact with web sites, since websites today are designed at a resolution of 1024×768.  Passive reading might be OK, but try to work on an interactive website, where the action buttons disappear, or just write a blog post where you have to click both above and under the editor area – the continuous vertical scrolling on Netbooks whose touchpad area typical leaves a lot to desire is a major inconvenience.

I can’t be the only user who find this a pain, and I can’t believe PC manufacturers would not receive similar feedback.  They probably do, but the problem is, they are not acting in an entirely free market: the Intel – Microsoft duopoly can dictate the terms. Now Reghardware in the UK reports Intel may be lifting the restriction placed on Atom N-based netbooks: manufacturers will now be allowed to build netbooks with higher res 10” displays – the ones that actually place the “Net” in the Netbook.  (Reghardware’s source is actually a Taiwanese manufacturer site, which until recently I would not have been able to read, but thanks to Google translate we can now all read Chinese…)

So the good news is, we’ll likely see 1366x768, 1200x800 ..etc resolutions soon.  The bad news is, they are still limited to 10” size.  Great for travel… but I admit I am as ancient as Ben is (actually, a lot more, but psst! ) and can not look at the microscopic characters you get when squeezing hi-res into a 10” screen for hours without major eye-sore. So that’s the next obstacle the industry needs to deal with.  Hi-res in a 12” screen, (OK, 11.6 will do) and we have a decent netbook that can actually be used for work.  Now, add to it SSD instead of a hard disk, a sub $500  price, and I’m running to buy…

Related posts:

• Screen Size: The Next Plan to Cripple Netbooks in Order to Protect a Dying Market
• Should You Redesign Your Website to 800x600 – Or Wait For Netbook Makers to Wake Up and Give Us Decent Screens?
• Confessions of a Gen X-er – Screen Size Matters
• Netbook or Notebook? It’s Not Only About Size.