Hi Bart

I know of about 5 people who have bought netbooks, and we all love them. We are all regular business travellers, I use mine in hotels and on trains, the others use them on planes or on the Thalys/Eurostar.

The main advantage of a netbook is that it's a fully functional machine, with a keyboard, and can be used to whack out e-mails, documents etc. at a similar speed to a laptop, while weighing about 1kg and with 6-8h of battery life. It's also very versatile, with a full suite of office apps, multimedia and games. They are also comparatively cheap and quite robust. Netbooks set out to provide lightweight mobile computing, and it does that extremely well.

I can't see myself using an iPad. It's another spin on the tablet PC and it's not got a keyboard. I can't get on with the iPhone's onscreen keypad, and I'm not sure if this will be any different. The more I look at it, this looks like Apple came up with this as a result of the move towards paid-for content in online print news, with the media industry hoping that it succeeds so they have an established online content charging and delivery platform.

Incidentally I also have a Sony eReader, that I bought last November. It's a great gadget (although I have a gripe about the pricing of ebooks - they should be cheaper than print editions..non?). It has battery life for about 2500 page turns, e-ink that is legible in strong sunlight and a touch-sensitive screen. It's got nothing like the functionality of the iPad, or my netbook, but it does its job so well that I couldn't imagine buying Apple's device to replace it.
It didn't like the sand on the beach yesterday though, still waiting for a manufacturer to come up with a sand-proof device :-)