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What better place than Las Vegas to showcase this years top electronic toys, for middle-aged boys and girls with discretionary spending money? Thursday, January 8th, marks the official opening of the annual Consumer Electronics Show, and according to BusinessWeek.com's preview, the Netbook is stealing the show in Vegas, and it's no wonder.

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When Notebook computers first hit the market decades ago, they promised real mobile computing, but for anyone who purchased a 15-inch or 17-inch notebook computer, you know they failed and can attest to the first impression when you picked one up, “Damn that's heavy”. While they were more mobile than a 19-inch VGA monitor and jumbo tower combination, you still needed either strong hands, biceps, shoulders and back, or a bag with wheels. The new generation netbooks weigh-in at right around two pounds and offer true ease of mobility. Their smaller size makes them a perfect fit for fold-down meal trays in economy class on airplanes, and they're a breeze to zip through security at airports when you have to remove everything including it and your shoes and load them into bus pans to keep our nation safe.

It should be no surprise that netbooks are a hit. They offer the perfect mobile-crossover vehicle for many baby boomers who have either resisted or were not invited to the Blackberry party, and whose eyes and fingers aren't good enough for the i-Phone. Netbooks offer a traditional keyboard even if they are a few percent smaller than full-size. Their entire layout is identical to the “typewriter” configuration which means they appeal to the higher age-group of computer users. You do sacrifice having a CD ROM / DVD reader and writer in your laptop, delegating these units to the role of fancy Internet connection device with serviceable memory amounts and fairly incredible storage capacities. But with the amount of free shareware available, the enormous capacity of the hard drives, and the affordability of external CD/DVD drives, there's no need to carry them around everywhere you go, just to occasionally load a software program from the endangered species of plastic disc storage vehicles. Most software at a price or free, is a form of instant gratification as you watch the load bar fill-in, megabytes at a time downloaded within minutes to your netbook, notebook or desktop.

The biggest selling point for netbooks though is their price. At between $250 and $400, they are on solid ground right between smart-phones and more traditional low-end notebook computers. That doesn't mean they will stay that way, netbooks are hitting both ends of the price spectrum with a new generation of very low-priced units using fifth-dimension operating systems and high-end models offering a variety of features to justify the higher price, including Windows Vista and Intel chipsets.

The next generations of these Internet wonders should be exciting to follow with special regard to the design trends of what the public catches onto, and what it chooses not to choose. Business Week reports the high amount of interest manufacturers have in developing touch-screen netbooks which should draw some of the millions of i-Phone enthusiasts and younger generation phone-heads closer. However each style of netbook will appeal to its own core market-share, and eventually, until the next big thing hits in a few months or years, someone, some manufacturer will come out with the perfect netbook, light as a feather, strong as an armored tank, sleek as a European Super-Model, smart as a European physicist, with the stamina of a porn star, and as thirsty for knowledge as a German at Oktoberfest.

William S. James, Salivates over Tiger-Direct catalogs