I had a couple of different netbooks, including an Asus eeepc, and a MSI wind. They were a fun novelty for the time, but always felt underpowered, even when brand new. The “everything on the cloud” paradigm hadn’t arrived yet, and running applications natively was a painful experience. They really were only good for checking your emails, or editing basic text documents. They had the cheapest possible, slowest flash disks for storage, super low resolution LCD screens, and their light weight flimsy plastic contruction made them feel like a toy.

I suppose Chromebooks fill that niche now, but they are at least useful for working in cloud based workflows where everything is through the browser.

The GDP Pocket devices are the opposite. Yes technology has come a long way in the last 15 years, but the GDP devices are purposely built for professionals to do real work on, their build quality is higher, they use fast storage, fast CPU, fast RAM, have plenty of I/O ports and have a surprisingly good keyboard.