This might come as a chock to some of you, but the netbook wasn't invented by Intel, but rather a UK company called Psion which made some of the best PDA's with keyboards back in the day. Things didn't go so well in the long run and the company got bought out by Teklogix.

Now it seems that the company isn't happy with people using the term Netbook as it's a registered trade mark that belongs to Psion and it's been registered as such in most of the world. The Psion Netbook wasn't that different from today's netbooks, it was a compact notebook, although it was running Psion's EPOC OS.

A law firm representing Psion Teklogix have been sending out cease and desist letters to various online publications asking them to stop using the term Netbook, although we're not sure if this also applies to netbook without a captical N. The law firm has given the publications until the end of March 2009 to remove all references to the word Netbook from their websites and stop using the term Netbook for anything but a Psion product.

We're not sure how Intel will react on this, since the term netbook has come from Intel alongside the term nettop and we presume Intel must've checked that it was ok to use it before they went ahead and started talking about these devices as netbooks. We'll have to wait and see how this plays out, but it's a strange move by Psion Teklogix as the company isn't even making the Psion Netbook longer and it only ever sold in limited quantities.

You can find a scanned version of the letter here