War Brewing on the Inexpensive Laptop Front 370
The Christian Science Monitor has an interesting look at the war brewing on the inexpensive laptop front. With everything from the Eee PC to the OLPC, the trend in slimming and trimming seems to be continuing. "The market segment is so new it doesn't have a name yet or even an agreed-upon set of specifications. Intel, the chipmaker, calls the category "netbooks," recognizing that much of what people do on their laptops involves going on the Net. The new machines are also being called ultra-low-cost PCs, mininotebooks, or even mobile Internet gadgets. In appearance, they have the familiar clamshell design, but they're smaller, with seven- to 10-inch screens. They offer full keyboards (albeit with smaller keys) and weigh less than three pounds. Perhaps most important, the majority cost less than $500 - some as little as $299. Intel says it expects more than 50 million of these netbooks to be sold by 2011. It's introduced a tiny, low-power processor to run them called Atom, which puts 47 million transistors on a chip about the size of a penny."
Re:intel created this market (Score:4, Informative)
Re:More interested in the education than the net (Score:4, Informative)
If your goal is to get your brother interested in programming, don't make him use a tiny monitor and keyboard, get him a low-end desktop PC with a real keyboard and acceptable screen. If you're on a budget, you can pick up a used monitor for almost nothing and spend everything on the box.
UMPCs (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Why so expensive? (Score:5, Informative)
In the case of these ultra-portables, a significant fraction of the cost also comes from the engineering and components required to make them so small and lightweight. You can of course get a clunky 200MHz laptop for real cheap (old model off eBay, for example), but it will not be as light or slick as the Eee PC or others.
The prices will probably keep dropping. But frankly I'm amazed at how cheap these ultra-portables already are: compare the performance, size, and price to what was available even 5 years ago and see how far we've come!
Re:Blast from the past! Handheld PC - H/PC - Palmt (Score:3, Informative)
To the road-warrior business traveler, maybe.
The platform is still pretty useless to the application developer, the artist, the musician, the scientific researcher, etc...
Re:Licensing fees fail as price drops to $200. (Score:3, Informative)
Damn right.
The I-Appliance BBS
http://www.linux-hacker.net/cgi-bin/UltraBoard/UltraBoard.pl [linux-hacker.net]
is full of interesting hacks on the leftover hardware from companies with "sell a crippled computer" business models. People want small fully capable computers, not broken shit that fits someone else's idea of what they should want.
Re:I'll keep my iPhone. (Score:4, Informative)
And as for Flash, the removal of nuisance ads from the web pretty much makes up for the loss of being able to see the handful of visualization elements done in SWF.
I would like to have a BT profile to use a slim keyboard with the iPhone for writing while traveling. That would make a great combination that's much lighter than a typical laptop and more practical than the joke UMPC/tiny laptops that try to do everything by doing it all poorly.
TFA seemed to be an ad for Intel's Atom, which I'm not convinced will uproot the existing mobile dominance of ARM processors, particularly since the only real need for x86 compatible chips in mobile devices is to support Microsoft's inability to get Windows to run on other hardware.
Given that the most interesting and successful small devices are running Linux or Apple's OS X, the need for x86 processors in that space is not at all obvious. Why wait for Intel to catch up when literally hundreds of ARM licensees are now shipping 3 billion parts a year?
Also note that Intel lost something like $5 billion pouring money into the StrongARM business it got from DEC (and rebranded as XScale) before handing it to Marvell for a mere $600 M. If it couldn't beat TI in ARM processors, how can it expect to beat ARM with an inferior and more complicated processor design?
ARM, x86 Chip Makers Fight to Ride Mobile Growth [roughlydrafted.com]
Will Apple Rescue Intel's Silverthorne? [roughlydrafted.com]
Are YOU kidding? (Score:3, Informative)
I believe you should do more research before posting:
PocketPuTTY [pocketputty.net]
Did you even try? http://www.google.com/search?q=ssh+windows+mobile [google.com]
Re:Blast from the past! Handheld PC - H/PC - Palmt (Score:3, Informative)
Meanwhile : Foldable keyboard (Score:4, Informative)
Even since my PalmIIIc period, I've been using foldable keyboard (by think outside and the like).
Note, I'm not speaking about the clamshell ones [cnetfrance.fr], nor the rollable ones [computeractive.co.uk].
I'm speaking about a box which has almost the same size as the Palm it self. It unfolds like an accordion in 4 parts. Once you've laid it flat, you slide the keys from the outer parts and you get a complete Desktop size ~90 keyboard (only lacks a keypad). This "sliding" locks the keyboard in open position, so you don't need a full flat place to used (compared to laser+infrared virtual keyboards) and you get actual tactile feed-back (not virtual keys. Real keys, which have the same size as those from your desktop).
Did all my note-taking at the university using such systems.
The best part is, now with the advent of common standard communication protocols like bluetooth, they produce one single model that fits for any bt-enabled PDA/smartphone/whatever (unlike back then, when they had to provide 1 model for every different proprietary connector that the market has come up with, and you had to rebuy a new one each time you changed your PDA).
Re:Licensing fees fail as price drops to $200. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:And it will get better with ATOM (Score:3, Informative)
Do Firefox, Konqueror etc. not compile on ARM?
-1: Redundant
Re:And it will get better with ATOM (Score:3, Informative)