TechCrunch’s own takedown of netbooks is actually a much-needed counter to the insane hype surrounding these mobile mediocrities, but it misses the point and lards the piece with bafflingly obvious errors.

“A typical Netbook has a 7 inch screen.”

Most netbooks have 9″ or 10″ displays. The 7″ netbooks of note are more than a year old and no longer easy to find. The only seven-incher in the house is Raon’s Everun Note, a UMPC with specs that far exceed those of netbooks.

“Some make do with as little as 256 MB.”

Few netbooks come with less than 1GB of memory, with 512MB configurations reduced to $250 Black Friday duty. To find 256MB, we again have to look back to old junk you can’t even buy anymore: even the ur-netbook, the Asus EeePC 2G, had half a gig.

“Netbooks use Intel Celeron, Intel Atom, or Via Nano CPU”

A netbook with Via’s Nano CPU? Now you’re jutht being thilly.

“The iPhone or iPod Touch, with a tiny 3.5 inch screen, has a vastly better browsing experience.”

This refers to a real netbook problem—600-line displays—but TechCrunch overplays it. As great as the iPhone’s cut of Safari is, we have to get real about its usefulness for work. A 480-pixel display can’t offer the plain utility of the 1280 horizontal pixels found on the average netbook.

“Any normal adult can’t type fast on it … it isn’t much better than a Blackberry-type mobile keyboard”

Please. As far as this can be taken seriously at all, it should suffice to say that I type just fine on netbooks—and I have blunt hobbit-fingers that can barely navigate a smartphone!

And what’s this about “normal” people!? Nerd Personality Disorder, much?

“Even the lower end XP and Linux, with normal computing is a heavy chore for these machines.”

I’m a performance whore, with a 4GB MacBook Pro and a gaming PC with a $500 video card, and was dissatisfied with performance on ony the cheapest netbooks. The culprit for basic performance problems in netbooks is usually cheap flash storage with poor write speeds: the answer is to buy one with a hard drive, or to avoid the cheaper EeePCs.

After saying the netbook’s keyboard is too small, TechCrunch again tries to pitch its keyboard-free touchscreen tablet concept again. It’s a fantastic proposal, but the idea that it’s an “answer” to the “problem” of netbooks—which are selling in the millions—isn’t fully baked.

An abiding belief that tablet UMPCs is the “answer” to the “problem” of cheap laptops is one that should be left to Intel and Microsoft: with HPCs, UMPCs and MIDS it’s been pissing money trying to serving those imaginary consumers for at least decade. “That’s a device people will want,” TechCrunch writes — if only they would just stop buying other stuff and listen!

Here are three things that will really improve netbooks, right now: 1. Fix the chipset power consumption problems so we really do get a full day on a 6-cell charge, 2. Larger screen resolution, 3: Cellular modem as standard in the U.S.

Three Reasons Why Netbooks Just Aren’t Good Enough [TechCrunch]