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Over at Gizmodo, Matt Buchanan has an excellent and quite complete breakdown of the terms used these days for small PCs. “Category Creep” has resulted in a lot of confusion for the average consumer over just what exactly these devices are for. The post takes a good shot at defining the most popular terms, considering which devices belong in each category and predicting which should be shaking out in the next year or so as small form computers become more and more common (and less and less likely to be used as makeup mirrors).

Buchanan intros the piece as follows:

When Blam broke the news on Dell’s mini Inspiron, there was one he was stuck on: How to categorize it. Is it a subnotebook? A UMPC? A netbook? (Knowing the specs might have helped, but probably not much.) Part of the problem is that the category names themselves are very new and pretty vague. Here’s a mini-compendium of the most popular terms for dwarfish laptops being tossed around, where they come from and what they’re trying to say. Help us decide which ones to keep, and which to ditch.

He covers the terms Ultraportable, Mini-notebook, ULPC, Netbook and UMPC. I have seen a couple more terms in the wild, such as the term Micro PC used by Sony for it’s Vaio UX490.

So what do you think, should the lexicon break down to just a term or two, or should marketing, like a fairy’s heart, beat wild and free? Are any of these terms keepers? Personally I feel that the term UMPC will stick for hobbyists and geeks, but the mainstream will need a more vanilla term like Netbook.

Anyone have any other names for the little darlings, not counting what you call them when you throw them against walls?

Zealot (468 Posts) - Website | Twitter | Facebook

By day a department manager and writer for a major network device vendor...by night Zealot stalks the mean magnetic streets, striking fear into the hearts of bandwidth abusers and theme park mascots. Zealot has been involved with mobile devices for more than a decade now, starting off with dumb phones, moving to PDAs and then to smartphones, notebooks and netbooks with the odd PMP thrown in. Most of his mobile time currently is spent on a Treo Pro, Zune HD, Thinkpad T61, Gigabyte M912M or a Hackintoshed Compaq Mini 704. He proudly groks the Geek community and considers himself a Neo Maxi Zune Dweebie (thanks Will Wheaton!).