An acquaintance recently bought an Android phone and complained that accessing that using Gmail from the browser on the phone, while it worked, interacted badly with multitasking; if he switched applications while composing an email, on his return the email in progress would be gone.

When you get down to it, I think this comes down to a big conceputal difference between the modern ultraportable device (a smartphone or similarly speced out web tablet) and a general use device (a desktop down, to most netbooks (as they usually run laptop/desktop OSes).

( and I go on on this topic for a while )

tl, dr: Use the browser on netbooks and better, but use apps on phones.