According to  the Digital Learning Environments newsletter, January 2011 (to which I am unable to link directly as you have to take out a free subscription), school districts in the USA are allocating their hardware purchasing budgets as follows:

Districts are looking more and more at the cost savings of purchasing netbooks but are still buying full-featured laptops. Here are the results [of our survey] in order of popularity.

Netbooks - 43%
Laptops - 31%
Desktops -14%
Tablet PCs - 11%

I find this quite interesting because my perception, from a UK perspective, is that tablets are emerging as a force to be reckoned with, but are not there yet. In terms of cost-effectiveness as measured by such things as battery life and range of applications, I would say that netbooks definitely have the edge over tablets.

What do you think?

This article first appeared in Computers in Classrooms, the free newsletter for educational ICT professionals.