Mr. Claus, I would be most appreciative if you would bring me a netbook this Christmas. What, you don’t know what a netbook really is? Oh come now, you big lug!

They’re notebooks basically only very, very portable. The average weight is 2 pounds and the screen size is at least 9 inches across. So you should look them up on the net, because it seems more and more people will want one soon.

In fact, according to Washington Post, it seems netbooks have become more desirable than iPhones. At least, that’s the conclusion one reaches when one looks at the netbook sales numbers at DisplaySearch and at Gartner’s smarthone sales records. In short, Q3 2008 saw 5.6 million netbooks going down the consumer drain compared to 4.7 million iPhones.

So it’s only natural that people started talking about whether Apple will come out with a netbook of its own, especially if things continue to evolve on this trend-path. For now, this is all the stuff of speculation; after all, netbooks don’t exactly step on the toes of iPhones.

The latter appeal to people who want a mobile machine featuring all sorts of interesting multimedia capabilities with the classical uses of a mobile phone, plus mobile email and web browsing. Netbooks are more closely related to laptops, and they’re more heavily orientated on web browsing, even if that’s far from being their sole purpose.  

Apple CEO Steve Jobs’s  official take on things is that the company doesn’t exclude going into the netbook niche, but that much of what a netbook does can already be found in the iPhone, so they’re not in a hurry to do it. Apple is the sole crafter of notebook PCs that skirted the netbook field of market battle so far.