• While you were out: Ten surprising tech happenings we were too busy to notice

    John Biggs

    Biggs is the East Coast Editor of TechCrunch. Biggs has written for the New York Times, InSync, USA Weekend, Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, Money and a number of other outlets on technology and wristwatches. He is the former editor-in-chief of Gizmodo.com and lives in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. You can Tweet him here and G+ him here. Email him directly at... → Learn More

    Monday, October 6th, 2008

    Rob at BBG wrote an excellent little list post describing changes to the tech industry that happened in the past five years. Written as a letter to someone who has been in hypersleep for the last half-decade, Rob points out that Palm is climbing a magical fantasy rainbow made of Linux, piracy is mainstream, and that the much vaunted UMD format is now essentially dead.

    6. Netbooks
    Those cheap, nasty subnotebooks that HP and NEC occasionally try and flog to vertical markets are now the hottest thing on Earth. They call them “Netbooks” now. Just about everyone makes one except Apple and Sony. For while, they tried to rebadge Handheld PCs as “Ultramobile PCs,” ruining their battery life by having them run full-scale operating systems, but no-one fell for it.

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