The Netbook Thread

Kronos · Post by **Kronos** » Thu Jun 14, 2007 11:14 am 0

Cheaper to get a USB 2 external 2.5inch notebook harddrive caddy and a 40gb hard drive in it (about Â£30 all in I would say or Â£50 for a 100gb unit) damned fast too

XP Pro installs are 1.08gb fresh. swapfile is whatever you make it but would guess .5gb for a swap file on a 512mb machine. 2gb free for most people after installs, and you could limit the swapfile manually to a couple of hundred mb's etc I guess.

Now the real question is when do we get them in the UK? there is no mention of this machine on the UK Asus website

WiteWulf · Post by **WiteWulf** » Thu Jun 14, 2007 11:21 am 0

I *so* want one of these to play with...although it'll be interesting to see how that $200 price translates to good, old, rip-off Britain.

Kronos · Post by **Kronos** » Thu Jun 14, 2007 11:23 am 0

Ahh, I might have to take a trip to the USA and take a spare suitcase if ASUS are gonna do a Sony/Microsoft over the $ to Â£ conversion

kalmar · Post by **kalmar** » Thu Jun 14, 2007 11:37 am 0

Wow that is cute!
But it seems a shame to have to use it with bloated, resource hungry OSs like XP and Linux. You want something that'll boot within a couple of seconds, responsive GUI that works well on a small screen, no messing about with virtual memory and swap files.
You know what I'm going to suggest

Shame it's lost in history and there aren't any apps for it though..

Kemper_Boyd · Post by **Kemper_Boyd** » Thu Jun 14, 2007 11:43 am 0

I don't believe the price at all.

The fairly similar Via Nanobook (it has a hard drive) is $600.
The Palm Foleo is $499 after a rebate.

The $200 price for a system with an Intel CPU and chipset, flash,
RAM, screen, wifi, case and battery sounds too good to be true.

It appears to be a much better bit of kit than the OLPC which costs
$175 and was very carefully designed to get the price down.

Istar · Post by **Istar** » Thu Jun 14, 2007 11:47 am 0

kalmar wrote:Wow that is cute!
But it seems a shame to have to use it with bloated, resource hungry OSs like XP and Linux. You want something that'll boot within a couple of seconds, responsive GUI that works well on a small screen, no messing about with virtual memory and swap files.
You know what I'm going to suggest Shame it's lost in history and there aren't any apps for it though..

CP/M?

kalmar · Post by **kalmar** » Thu Jun 14, 2007 11:52 am 0

Kemper_Boyd wrote: The $200 price for a system with an Intel CPU and chipset, flash,
RAM, screen, wifi, case and battery sounds too good to be true.

I'm tempted to believe it's possible. If you look at prices of other products like portable media players or the DS - the rest of it apart from the intel bits and keyboard seem to be worth about $100 to retail.
Whether they will really sell it at a low margin and high volume is a different matter, but if they don't, someone will.
I was hoping it would be Apple but no sign of that.

Firefox · Post by **Firefox** » Thu Jun 14, 2007 6:02 pm 0

The videos of OLPC prototypes are starting to look very impressive of late! Looks very snappy in use, and plays fullscreen videos very smoothly. They've made the trackpad and the areas to the left and right of it into a sort of Wacom tablet now, so you can write or draw on it.

I'm very glad to see the coming wave of solid-state inexpensive laptops from lots of different sources, anyway. They make so much more sense for the vast majority of people than Â£1000 miniaturised PCs with all of their spinning drives and fans, ouch-ouch-hot! and meagre few hours' battery life.

Should be very good news for schoolkids and students in the first world, too!

Acronym · Post by **Acronym** » Thu Jun 14, 2007 6:39 pm 0

Intel hate the OLPC with a passion. There may be some creative accountancy going on here - I'd say it's a very long shot, but not long enough to dismiss out of hand...

Kemper_Boyd · Post by **Kemper_Boyd** » Thu Jun 14, 2007 6:57 pm 0

Acronym wrote:Intel hate the OLPC with a passion. There may be some creative accountancy going on here - I'd say it's a very long shot, but not long enough to dismiss out of hand...

It's amazing how they've built a faster machine with more RAM and flash
for barely any more. The McCaslin platform was said to be aimed at building
a $500 UMPC, it's barely launched and there's a $200 model. Perhaps it's
just me but I do find that a little odd.

Purple Grapefruit · Post by **Purple Grapefruit** » Thu Jun 14, 2007 7:20 pm 0

Maybe there's going to be some online advertising
tie-in and/or obligation to use a certain ISP.

A business model that would work in the rich west
and subsidise the cost of the machine that won't
work in the third world?

.........Or perhaps i'm just cynical.

Kronos · Post by **Kronos** » Thu Jun 14, 2007 8:26 pm 0

Purple Grapefruit wrote:Maybe there's going to be some online advertising
tie-in and/or obligation to use a certain ISP.

A business model that would work in the rich west
and subsidise the cost of the machine that won't
work in the third world?

.........Or perhaps i'm just cynical.

Reminded me of this, cracking telephone but not completely FREE in terms of usage after purchase of phone IIRC. Maybe you will be restricted to a particular ISP, maybe there will be some sort of additional revenue though or advertising.

Then again maybe it is a very simple motherboard, zero expandability, (does it have PCMCIA sockets? no hard drive or IDE controllers, completely integrated motherboard). Possibly selling for an initial loss aswell if Intel want that to happen because lets face it it will sell faster than hot OR cold cakes

Atty · Post by **Atty** » Thu Jun 14, 2007 8:47 pm 0

Wow, the little fella does look nice. Pretty much the ideal little lappy for me, as it is probably fast enough for the likes of ZDoom and perhaps even SShock2.

Still, yeah, you'd want atleast 8GB, and it's still not clear whether the 10" model is any higher res than the 7" model. Also, I'm a smidge suspicious about things like build quality, the quality/refresh rate of the screen, how well the webcam would work, etc..

Definitely one to keep an eye on, though. I was itching after a cheap, small laptop a while ago, but they were all over-specced for my needs and way out of my budget.

noodles · Post by **noodles** » Thu Jun 14, 2007 9:43 pm 0

Looks quite a lot like the Vaio sub-notebook I have running Win2K.

If they get it under 400$ it they should move quite a few of them.

The nice thing must be the weight gain by losing the HD.

Wonder what kind of power demand the flash ram access creates ?
Will it last for days on one charge or is the gain just marginal ?

Dio · Post by **Dio** » Thu Jun 14, 2007 9:49 pm 0

silent_unicorn wrote:Cheaper to get a USB 2 external 2.5inch notebook harddrive caddy and a 40gb hard drive in it (about Â£30 all in I would say or Â£50 for a 100gb unit) damned fast too

Not much cop if you want it to be 100% portable though. My main use for it would be on holidays.

The $200 price for a system with an Intel CPU and chipset, flash, RAM, screen, wifi, case and battery sounds too good to be true.

Good point, even given the way RAM, LCD and flash prices have haemorraged in the last year or so...

Asus have shown a willingness to work to a paper-thin margin in the past.

Let's have a putative BOM with markup assuming the same margins as on individual components:
Motherboard: Â£25 + wifi? Â£10?
RAM: Â£10
CPU: ? - Â£30-40?
4G flash: Â£30
That's $200 without the case, screen and battery. So yeah, $299 looks a bit more likely to me.