As we are seeing a dramatic rise in the smaller, low cost laptops that have been primarily built for web browsing, netbooks are taking over the fastest growing laptop sales category. We as designers need to take into account the smaller screen resolutions that are now on the market. The typical netbook screen resolution (although improving) is between 800 x 480 and 1024 x 600. With most designers and developers common practice nowadays is to design for a fold depth of 768px. This means a decrease in fold of around 22% leaving less creative real estate. Will we as designers/developers take note of this and incorporate it into our designs?

I personally think that netbooks, although cheap and effective for their set purpose, that’s all they are good for. Word Documents, PowerPoint’s and web browsing, but with a lot of them their battery life is extremely poor, taking away from the portability you would expect. I would recommend going for a more powerful laptop like my very own Samsung Q45. Tiny but runs like a trooper with Photoshop, Flash and Illustrator all open at once.

I think that although it is defiantly worth bearing in mind, it certainly depends on the client and their target market whether we design for netbook resolutions or not.