[Sitting in for Anthony Caruana]

All this year, the battle for portable computing has rested with two similar but distinct technology products. The Smartphone (most notably Apple's iPhone 3G, but also Blackberry and HTC's offerings) and the Netbook - a category so owned by Asus that every single Netbook reviewed this year's been compared to the ever-expanding Eee line.

The choice between the two hasn't just focused on whether or not you can stuff it in your pocket or bag, however. For the record, most of the time I lug around both - at the moment it's been either an iPhone 3G or Blackberry Storm (I'm not a big fan of the Storm, but it's in my review queue at the moment, so needs must) and my trusty Eee 701, which is currently running Ubuntu Eee. The 701 was, of course, the first netbook to hit the market, and the one that got people excited about the Netbook concept -- largely because it brought ultraportable computing to the masses at a $600 price point, which was pretty revolutionary.

Since then, though, the Netbook revolution has stalled, and I'd even say gone backwards somewhat. Netbook specifications have improved, it's true - although they've again hit a plateau, with everyone employing the same Intel processor, and artificially stalled at a 1GB memory platform, thanks to Microsoft refusing to licence XP for systems above 1GB. Why vendors aren't sticking to their Linux guns and releasing 2GB Netbooks, I have no idea.

More critically, however, the mild increase in specs has been matched by a large increase in price. Most new netbooks are now hitting between $700 and $1,000, twelve months after the release of the original Eees. It's possible to get a $400 netbook with a lot of shopping around, but these are mostly end of life units; everybody's playing in the high-cost deep end of the netbook pool.

Most tech categories get cheaper over time, but Netbooks are bucking this trend. Given the current economic climate, I'm not sure that's wise. They're also getting larger, and while the bigger keyboards that brings are a nice addition, the fact that they're bulkier doesn't go unnoticed either.

Meanwhile, Smartphones get smarter. As mentioned, I'm not that fond of the Storm so far - I think losing the keyboard that differentiated Blackberry from the crowd is a big mis-step on RIM's part - but there's no denying that it fills many of the roles that a Netbook can fill. And Smartphone prices are even, ahem, "smarter" than many netbooks, whether it's a zero-dollar down item like a Storm or iPhone 3G, or even a pre-purchased Android model like the Kogan Agora. There is, admittedly a race from the other side, with products like Vodafone's postpaid 3G version of the Dell Inspiron Mini taking a page out of the mobile playbook.

There are things I don't want to do on a Smartphone - like typing up this column, at least not yet - but the gap is getting ever shorter. If it gets much slimmer, will Netbooks have a future as a category at all?