What’s the ideal platform for netbooks?

With all the focus in the last few weeks on Palm and Apple’s new smartphones, one question remains unanswered: What’s the fate of the netbook?

My personal view is that we’re likely to see more overlap over time between smartphones, tablets, netbooks, and dedicated single-purpose devices like Amazon’s Kindle. I don’t expect there to be a single uber-device that does it all; that’s just not realistic. These devices have different roles and different form factors that are optimized for different use-case scenarios. But once people get a taste for the ease-of-use and always-on connectivity of a smartphone that does Wi-Fi and 3G, you have to wonder why they wouldn’t want those same capabilities on other devices.

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Contrast that with the typical Windows laptop experience. I’m constantly amazed at how long Windows takes to reboot and how often the hibernate feature just doesn’t work. Sure, it’s better than it used to be, but its nowhere near the “instant on” that Apple laptops provide or what’s expected in a smartphone or in a high-volume consumer device. Despite these limitations, Windows has dominant market share in the netbook market right now. And Microsoft is indicating that Windows 7 will offer additional improvements.

But with ongoing platform progress from Android, Ubuntu, Palm, and Apple, as well as the rapid market growth of low-cost netbooks, I believe we are still in the early innings and this market will be up for grabs to whatever platform can bring a better user experience and a large number of applications. Windows has the lion’s share today, but I’m not sure that the need to run Microsoft Office or traditional Windows applications is as compelling as it once was, given the wide availability of OpenOffice.org, Google Docs, and other applications.

What do you think? If you could get the iPhone OS or Palm’s WebOS on a two-pound netbook for less than $500, how interesting would that be? Let me know your thoughts.