In a CNet interview, RIM founder and co-CEO, Mike Lazaridus, says, when asked if he considers netbooks competitors to the BlackBerry,

No, I think I can put Netbooks in here [referring to the BlackBerry Storm]. These are netbooks. They are just smaller.

Big Mike is not generally known for making just plain crazy and ludicrous assertions so we had to head over to Wikipedia to check out the definition of netbook before we chalked this comment up to too much time spent next to the hard eggnog bowl at the RIM holiday party.

I guess that if you ignore the first sentence of that definition where it says that “A netbook is a light-weight, low-cost, energy-efficient, highly portable laptop…” ,  you only loosely apply the rest of the definition, and say it with an an extremely straight face to someone that has never seen a netbook or really knows all that much about current technology, you could get some to believe that the BlackBerry Storm is a netbook.

[Via SlashGear]