FlipStart to Replace Your Laptop?

WED Fan writes "Paul Allen has a new hardware venture, smaller than a laptop, larger than a blackberry. According to the Seattle P-I, the vision is to replace the laptop for most everyday use, such as office applications, email, and web surfing. 'Really, FlipStart gives you everything that your laptop does [...] We're not promoting the idea that you would do CAD design on it, but for Office applications and most of what people do with their laptops, it's great.' But at a $2000 price tag, this could be a little bit out of the range of many users. The product will launch on FlipStart.com in the not to distant future."

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Vaporware since 2004

[Crash McBang]

Google 'flipstart' - you'll find that this thing has been Vaporware since before 2004.

I'll believe it when woot has it on sale...

I loved my sub-notebook for some things

[EmbeddedJanitor]

Psion 7. Instant on. Zero boot/wakeup time. Pretty good battery life. Smaller/lighter/slower than a laptop. Pretty decent keyboard (better than a blackberry etc)

Sucky things: If it is too big to fit in your pocket you have to hand lug it and the size is not a huge benefit over a regular laptop. Screen is really too small, even for word processing etc.

Re:The Sub-Notebook returns!

[Volante3192]

It's not from Microsoft; it just happens to run Windows.

Paul Allen hasn't been with MS for decades.

Re:The Sub-Notebook returns!

[AKAImBatman]

Apple was originally going to do the same on their 17" PowerBooks, but they killed the idea for a simple reason: Adding the number pad forced the keyboard to shift to one side. Which ruined the ergonomics of the device, and generally required that users type in an unbalanced configuration. (Not so good when you're using it on your lap.) That's why the 17" PowerBooks all had that odd space around the keyboard area.

Re:Get an OQO instead

[ArhcAngel]

I'm shocked this is the only comment mentioning the OQO! I had the opportunity to work with the OQO 1+ model for almost a year and while it was not a speed demon by any stretch of the imagination it was more than competent. With the 02's bumped up processor speed and mobile broadband built in I can hardly see any reason to even introduce the flipstart (or should that be falsestart). At $2K I can purchase the fully loaded OQO 02 with Windows Vista (yes there are tutorials on installing Linux)and that includes any shipping costs.