Sony Says Eee PC Signals "Race To the Bottom"

Alex Dekker writes "Sony's Mike Abary says in an interview, 'If [Asus's Eee PC] starts to do well, we are all in trouble.' Presumably by 'we' he means all the hardware manufacturers who sell over-priced, full-fat laptops. And he's not going to be too pleased when he sees the Linux-powered, sub-$200 Elonex One. Looks like what's bad for Sony may be good for the consumer." The CNet article mentions that a version of the Eee running XP is available in Japan now and will be coming to the US within weeks.

Comments

Re:When do we get these affordable laptops?

[Just Some Guy]

I want one for this exact reason as well. Been too busy/lazy to really research it (and/or get my employer to buy me one).. how well does it function as a "portable thin client"?

Wonderfully. It comes with Firefox preconfigured with Flash and other plugins, Thunderbird, Kontact, OpenOffice, and lots of other useful apps.

Can I reinstall it to get rid of the easy mode programs and turn it into a simple portable xterm?

Well, ctrl-alt-T gets you an xterm in the default install. You can reinstall if you want (and some people have been putting XP on them), but you might not want to.

In fact, at the risk of having my geek card revoked: I don't even go into advanced mode anymore. It boots more slowly than easy mode, and easy mode is good enough for me 99% of the time. I'm a huge KDE fan so I expected to hate the basic launcher and "need" the full KDE desktop, but all that extra flexibility kind of misses the point of the Eee PC.

Re:When do we get these affordable laptops?

[Neil Jansen]

I use mine daily and don't think the 800x480 is such a compromise. Once you implement some tricks to optimize your window manager and web browser, it's not bad at all. I run web apps like Google Docs, Mail, Calendar, Reader, etc.

I'm not exactly sure what a 'full blown' internet application is, but I've never ran into anything and been like 'damn, this is totally unusable'.