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Thanks to their utilitarian design and low prices, netbooks are inspiring a booming subculture of hackers souping up their liliputers with touchscreens, Bluetooth and unauthorized operating systems like Apple’s Mac OS X.
As netbook sales continue to soar, more and more tech-savvy grease monkeys are dismantling netbooks to add fancy features including back-lit keyboards, GPS and longer-lasting batteries.
Netbook modding is becoming so popular, Winter has launched a netbook-modding business: Winter Computer Solutions, which mods customers’ netbooks with GPS, Bluetooth, DVD readers or HDTV tuners.
Winter, who runs his burgeoning business on his netbook, is known for his remarkable netbook-mod stunts.
He once sold an Asus Eee PC netbook sporting every mod you can imagine: A 7-inch touchscreen, Air Play for transmitting FM radio, an overclocked processor, a Bluetooth adapter like IBM 02K5669 Ac Adapter
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DIY Devices, an up-and-coming electronics store, is planning to sell a kit called the Aeeeris, which will convert netbooks into tablets. Though a kit makes the procedure sound easy, converting a clamshell netbook into a tablet is considered an extreme mod — it’s not for the faint of heart. Available for a $60 pre-order, the kit includes a base, but a touchscreen must be purchased separately.
Another netbook modding nut goes by the handle "JKK." He hosts a web site dedicated to tutorials on netbook modding, and he says hacking mini notes is so trendy because it’s generally very easy — even for non-engineers. JKK Mobile’s most popular hack was installing a stylus-controlled touchscreen on an Asus
EEE PC, which JKK said was simple enough to do with a $50 kit from a Chinese manufacturer.
"The easiest things can actually be done by anyone," he said in a phone interview. "You don’t even have to open the whole device."
Brad Linder, writer of Liliputing, a blog devoted to ultraportable devices, thinks there’s even more behind the netbook modding craze. He noted that the modder community is continuing to make hacking netbooks easier because there’s a wealth of knowledge on the internet — forums, blogs and even instructions provided by Dell — discussing how to dissect them.
"It’s not like people haven’t been hacking hardware for years as well, but I feel like these little machines have become a paradise for hackers," Linder said. "While [netbooks are] designed to have low-income audiences, educational markets and kids, the people who mod these the most are nerds."
Making it easy, netbooks are all very similar in terms of specification and build. Practically every new netbook features a 1.6-GHz Intel Atom processor with either a 9- or 10-inch screen; the variations between models are very minor, which is why modding generally remains simple with the release of each new netbook.
And despite the general principle that smaller gadgets should be more difficult to customize in terms of hardware, Linder noted that their insides —
such as hard drives, 3-G cards and so on — are getting smaller, too, so it’s not too difficult to cram more features into these netbooks.
Linder, however, said he shies away from hardware mods and that he’s more of a "software guy." His Eee PC 1000H triple boots Windows XP, Ubuntu 8.04 Linux and Mandriva 2009 Linux.
One of the most popular software hacks for netbooks is installing Mac OS X Leopard, Linder said. The process typically takes people a few hours —
but that’s not long compared to the amount of time consumers will have to wait for Apple to finally deliver a netbook.
"People were talking about Apple coming out with a laptop under $800 for the first time, and someone already made one and it’s a netbook," he said. "I’m really impressed that the user community is able to accomplish things that even major manufacturers aren’t doing."