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Sub-$100 Laptops Have Finally Arrived
Posted by
timothy
on Thu Sep 04, 2008 07:04 PM
from the near-enough-at-least dept.
from the near-enough-at-least dept.
Roman Phalanx writes "OLPC had promised that it would be possible to mass produce a sub-$100 laptop. The folks at OLPC tried to realize that dream by re-imagining what a laptop looks like. How large of screen and keyboard it has. What OS runs on the laptop. Now that OLPC has decided to super size their systems to run Windows XP, the $100 price point has slipped beyond their reach. A Chinese firm has realized that dream. Taking the best from both the OLPC and EeePC. They ditched x86 compatibility and switched to a MIPS architecture to further reduce production costs. HiVision has managed to create a UMPC that sells right now for $120.00. They say they have refined the manufacturing process and have learned from building this laptop how to mass produce a laptop that will sell for $98.00." (More below, including a link to a video of the device.)
"The new HiVision MiniNote is due out in October of 2008. TechVideoBlog has footage of one of these Mini Notes being shown off at a trade show in Germany. They have managed to borrow a unit overnight for a while and have done a quick review on it.
Overall it looks pretty good. MIPS based processor, WiFi, 1GB flash storage, it runs Linux, has 3 USB ports, Ethernet, SDHC card reader, audio in and out, multi-tabbed Firefox browser support and Abiword for word processing. Running a custom Chinese Linux distrubution named Xip.
Overall performance seems snappy and no problems connecting to WiFi. Other than the lack of a webcam and the Adobe Flash Player it seems perfect. For $98 it looks like quite a value."
Overall performance seems snappy and no problems connecting to WiFi. Other than the lack of a webcam and the Adobe Flash Player it seems perfect. For $98 it looks like quite a value."
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Because the interweb is unreliable (Score:5, Informative)
Here is a quick link to a youtube video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKQbN6tpYXw [youtube.com]
And I promise, it's not a rick rolling.
Re:Because the interweb is unreliable (Score:5, Funny)
The HiVision [hvsco.com] site is down (slashdotted)... Site must be hosted on a sub $100 server.
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video resolution...bleh (Score:5, Insightful)
looks like 800x480 is becoming the new 1280×1024.
Re:video resolution...bleh (Score:5, Interesting)
Maybe lower-resolution devices really are on the usage upswing.
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Re:video resolution...bleh (Score:5, Informative)
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Flash won't be here soon (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Flash won't be here soon (Score:5, Informative)
Gnash already has MIPS support [wikipedia.org]. As this project is actually still moving right along, we can only hope for more. Plus, Gnash already supports YouTube (although it seems people are still having problems).
Bottom line: Thoughts of Adobe supporting Flash on MIPS is a joke. Gnash already supports MIPS but we'll have to wait a little longer for Gnash to support more advanced features.
NOTE: Swfdec [freedesktop.org] also supports MIPS. I have had more luck with Swfdec, and some distros are making it the default free Flash player. Plus, it seems to have more advanced feature supported.
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A feature, not a bug (Score:5, Funny)
No flash? That's a feature, not a bug!
Wake me when they ship (Score:5, Insightful)
So... "Sub-$100 Laptops Have Finally Arrived". And yet... they haven't. It'd be nice (although, apparently, unrealistic) to think that we've learnt by now not to give credence to vaporware. Color me unimpressed.
Re:Wake me when they ship (Score:5, Funny)
Color me unimpressed.
I too refuse to be satisfied until it comes with my happy meal.
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Re:Wake me when they ship (Score:5, Insightful)
There's no doubt it's possibly vaporware.
But, there are 2 things to consider. 1. The model they displayed is 120--not too far off from 100, really. 2. The 98 model is due out in october, which is one month away. It might be that it is perpetually 1 month away, but I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt until november.
The real question for me is the usefulness of it. That thing looks like it's slightly larger than a Nintendo DS, which is pretty small. I'm wondering just how easy this thing will be to use, or if I'll have to resort to hunt and peck, or thumbing the keyboard to type in what I want.
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where to get one? (Score:5, Interesting)
This is the hardware stats (Score:5, Informative)
This shows on the YouTube video at 03:58:
400MHz/32bit CPU
128M/64M RAM
1GB NAND Flash
Linux or WinCE
7" 800x480 display
Wireless LAN 802.11b/g
10/100M ethernet
I'll believe that they "have arrived"... (Score:5, Insightful)
...when there's a link to BUY ONE. Now. Right now. I have my credit card at the ready. Where can I buy one, even at the $120 price point that they are supposedly selling "right now" for?
Well? Link or it didn't happen. Otherwise, this is just another fucking slashvertisement.
Re:MIPS will make it a hard sell (Score:5, Insightful)
it only has a 1GB HD. I think the idea is it's an appliance, not intended for you to really add apps to it. Theoretically it comes with what you need for what it's intended to do. It may or may not find a mass market, but only a subset of geeks will try to see what else they can run on it...
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Re:MIPS will make it a hard sell (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:MIPS will make it a hard sell (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:MIPS will make it a hard sell (Score:5, Informative)
No precompiled apps to download,
Yeah, there's only a little over 20,000 precompiled MIPS packages here [debian.org]. (Well, technically, somewhere in here [debian.org], with an index located here [debian.org].) I tend to think that 20,000+ is a little bit more than zero, but maybe that's just me. :)
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Re:MIPS will make it a hard sell (Score:5, Funny)
What are you talking about, 20,000 has 4 zeros in it!
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Re:MIPS will make it a hard sell (Score:5, Insightful)
No, of course not.
It's the fact that:
it's trivially to compile for MIPS once you've got it compiled for every other major architecture.
the likes of Debian and other non-commercial distros have policies to ensure that all possible architectures are fully supported.
MIPS is an extremely popular architecture (Embedded, PDAs, SGI systems, etc.) ...that means there's tons of MIPS binary packages available for download.
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Re:MIPS will make it a hard sell (Score:5, Informative)
No? Have you heard of acronym collisions before?
Millions of Instructions Per Second
vs.
Microprocessor without Interlocked Pipeline Stages
And don't get me started on "POWER"/"PowerPC", because, of course, those terms would never refer to anything other than a CPU architecture...
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Re:Flashlessness kills it (Score:5, Interesting)
The iphone doesn't run flash and it costs twice as much. No one will ever buy one!
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Re:Flashlessness kills it (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:heh.. (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:heh.. (Score:5, Informative)
Indeed! Phones and netbooks will help us eradicate Flash from the Web!
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