Which article? This article, which makes the audacious claim that Dell's decision to bundle GPS with the Mini 10 is, well, dumb. Their reasoning? "Netbooks are just too darn big for this job!" - the job being turn-by-turn car navigation.

The author has obviously been firmly entrenched in a very deep hole for much of the last five years, as has anyone else who seriously believes the only reasonable use case for GPS-enabled netbooks is in-vehicle navigation. Geolocation data is powerful: think local search, augmented reality; think geotagging, geocaching, geohashing; think Google Latitude and Google Goggles and Seek 'n Spell; think the end of IP-based location estimation, the start of reliable traffic-flow analysis, the ability to connect with nearby devices through mesh networks, the ability to track lost devices. This is just a start - despite unresolved privacy concerns, I give it at most ten years before consumers will demand geolocation from their gadgets.

So why have it in a netbook? Despite the fantastic usability of touchscreen mobile devices, they still aren't quite full-on computers; they function mostly as read-only devices, with small exceptions in terse environments like Twitter and text-messaging. I wouldn't program or blog on one. On the other hand, the mobile environment is smaller, more immediate - well-suited to the immediacy of things like Google Goggles. I wager that there is significant market space for more intensive location-based web apps aimed at non-mobile devices, and potentially even more market space for location-based apps that transfer seamlessly between the two environments. If Joe Hewitt's dream of a mobile web (as opposed to disjoint ecosystems of device-specific apps) should ever bear fruition, frameworks to make this sort of crossover much easier will soon follow.