A few days ago I was rambling about form factors and now primo IT website of the UK, The Register, posts their take on notebook categories and how they are defined.

With the recent controversy and lawsuits around use of the phrase netbook, along with the general confusion over notebooks vs ultraportables vs ultrathin vs how ultra stupid stuff like this can get, The Reg’s handy-dandy flow chart is just in time. Be sure to send this to your tech-ignorant friends and relatives.

My take:
Overall this flowchart seems pretty spot-on. The big differentiators revolve around screen size, inclusion of an optical drive, and weight, which are where I draw my lines in the sand as well. What does seem a bit off is that the deciding factor around the netbook is if there are “video ports.” I don’t know quite what they mean by “video ports,” but many netbooks now have VGA output. Perhaps a better differentiator would have been the Atom processor, but maybe that is too easy. C’mon Reg, get with it…

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