I’m sit­ting at Chipo­tle putting the fin­ish­ing touches on an arti­cle about decid­ing between using thick clients (Word, Out­look) ver­sus thin clients (Google Docs, Gmail) on net­books, and a guy walks up to me and stares until I take out my ear­buds (one of the rea­sons I love writ­ing at Chipo­tle is that between my hear­ing dam­age and my –20db head­phones, it’s actu­ally less dis­tract­ing here than at home).

He points at my HP Mini-​note. “Where do you get a com­puter like that?” He explains that he needs to get a PC for his daugh­ter in high school.

I tell him that for a high schooler, I wouldn’t actu­ally rec­om­mend the HP, as it’s a lit­tle pricier than the com­pe­ti­tion. I tell him about the Asus eee 1000, which has a 10” screen, comes pre­loaded with XP and could run all the stuff she needs for school. Then I tell him he can find it locally at Best Buy for $399.

His eyes nearly pop out of his head, and he starts grin­ning widely. I make note of this, and he says, “Wow, that’s such a great deal.” He booked out of the restau­rant and I’d bet dol­lars to donuts he was headed straight for Best Buy.

I see this sort of thing all the time. I’ve talked before about my 12-​year-​old niece’s netbook-​lust, and the other day when she brought her friend over while I was at my sister’s for the Bron­cos humil­i­at­ing defeat by game against the Patri­ots, her friend was also star struck at the pos­si­bil­i­ties afforded by a com­puter of her very own that she could take anywhere.

Paul Thur­rott and Leo Laporte dis­cussed net­books in this week’s Win­dows Weekly pod­cast (along with soundly thrash­ing Win­dows Mobile) and dis­missed them as a tem­po­rary bridge between tra­di­tional lap­tops and future smart­phones run­ning desktop-​class oper­at­ing sys­tems. While I like the idea of a Win­dows smart­phone run­ning the same Win­dows ker­nel as the desk­top ver­sion, using the same API for pro­grams and hav­ing binary com­pat­i­bil­ity with desk­top Win­dows, but using a user inter­face opti­mized for mobile use, that doesn’t obvi­ate netbooks.

I’ve used mobile phones for years as stand-​ins for ultra-​mobile PCs, and the prob­lem isn’t the oper­at­ing sys­tem or appli­ca­tions. As evi­denced by the pop­u­lar­ity of not only net­books but devices like the Celio Red­fly, form fac­tor mat­ters. A clamshell device with a larger screen and touch-​typable key­board is just bet­ter for some things. I post blog entries and read Google Reader from both my Treo and my Mininote, but I read ebooks exclu­sively on the Treo and write longer form work exclu­sively on the Mininote. It’s about using the right tool for the right job, and it’s becom­ing increas­ing obvi­ous every day that net­books are the tools a lot of peo­ple have been wait­ing for.