Geocaching is a great sport. Participants will see places they never knew existed, and those places are often right in their own backyards. Sometimes, though, any cacher needs help.

Many of us have taken to doing paperless geocaching. Some print out binders worth of notes on caches and keep them in their car, along with a GPS, others of us keep all that data electronically.

Numerous tutorials exist to help people learn how to use Windows Mobile devices and Palm devices to make better use of paperless geocaching. I've even written one that is linked here on this site. However, they all fall down due to limitations of the devices in question.

Geocaching with paper is hard. You have to get the locations into your GPS, sometimes manually. You have to remember to print things out. You have to remember to grab all your papers. You have to keep them in order, together. You have to make sure you download all the caches you want to cache, and keep track of any caches you want to do together manually.

Paperless geocaching is hard. You have to remember to synchronize your data. You have to remember to upload it, either manually or using some conversion process that is only done after synchronizing the mobile device with a computer. The devices are, unfortunately, slow. Searching for nearby caches is slow. The entire process is slow, error prone, and frustrating (and still better, in my opinion, than carrying printed copies of the caches around).

Obviously, you can't carry a whole desktop with you. Typical laptops are too big to be portable enough for taking on any hike.

But when I purchased my netbook (the Asus EEE 901), I saw possibilities for paperless geocaching.

Netbooks are small, typically measuring less than 10in (25cm) on the diagonal. They are light, with the heavy ones weighing 2.2lbs (1kg). They are extremely portable, and can go easily into a backpack for taking on the trail. And don't forget the possibilities for geocaching with paper, too. A simple to use program can manage all the complexity, and just give you what you want to go caching for a day.

Thanks to netbooks, the rules have changed. It's time for computer assisted geocaching to become something transparent. Something which assists the user in finding those caches. Something which helps the user easily track what they've done and what's left to do. Something which helps them remember the notes they took 10 caches ago that are now required to solve the puzzle cache they're staring at.

It's time for geocachers to graduate into the next level of caching. It's time for Cache901.