In what could be the technology world’s equivalent of the first peanut butter and jelly sandwich, gadget makers are working to combine two of their most successful innovations of recent years. They’re spreading touch-screen technology on top of netbooks to create devices that could become as popular as America’s laziest lunch. The creators include Apple, which is widely expected to launch an iPod with a 10-inch touchscreen this year.

Netbooks, which we wrote about here for anyone who needs a primer, have proven wildly popular because of their low prices and quick start-up times. They appeal to people who want a computer just to read their email, check the weather forecast or read the New York Times. In other words, all the things you can do on an iPhone. The iPhone and its cousin the iPod Touch are, in essence, netbooks with small screens and no keyboards.

For some people, the lack of a physical keyboard on the iPhone is a deal-breaker. So a larger screen device without a keyboard might seem even less appealing. But as anyone who has tried to watch a video or read a website while balancing a computer on their lap knows, a keyboard can be a hindrance when its presence compromises how you can position the screen. A touch controlled device with a screen big enough to read a newspaper or book comfortably is, to my mind, the ideal form factor for the morning commute and weekends on the patio. Amazon’s Kindle application will make a whole lot more sense on a large-screen iPod.

TechCrunch blogger Michael Arrington feels so passionately about this type of netbook that he’s developing his own product that he hopes to sell for $300. Such competition could eat into whatever premium Apple hopes to charge for its version. That would help get prices to a level where they become as common among commuters as the iPod. Just be sure to keep your PB&J sandwich away from the screen.

Amazon’s Kindle application for the iPhone

CDs and DVDs are headed for extinction and print may follow when some son-of-Kindle replaces newspapers and books, but one piece of low capacity media seems to have no expiry date: the business card. Business cards are the cockroaches of the old media world, apparently destined to survive the apocalypse. Unless you’re incredibly well organized — does anyone buy those card scanners? — your desk is probably littered with these souvenirs of new relationships.

What I want is to be able to exchange this information with the press of a button on my BlackBerry, my iPod or whatever device I happen to be carrying. The Palm products always had the ability to beam a business card to another Palm and the next upgrade to the iPhone software will reportedly do likewise, but this still limits the virtual card swapping to people with the same device. There’s a global standard for formatting the data in electronic business cards — it’s called vCard — but no hardware standard for transmitting and receiving the information.

It’s a geeky fantasy and wouldn’t go down well in Japan, where the formalities of exchanging meishi are as essential as a handshake, but surely it can’t be that hard.