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CNet Compares Eee PC Against the Competition
An anonymous reader writes "CNet has recently done a comparison of the Asus Eee PC against six bargain laptops that all fall under $1000. Included in the list is the Elonex One, OLPC, EasyNote XS and MSI Wind. "Since the Eee's launch, many of its rivals have begun to create similar alternatives — each designed to pilfer a piece of the budget ultraportable pie. Some are trying to beat the Eee on price, some on specs, but they're all tiny and they're all camped out in the bargain basement." Let the 'race to the bottom' begin."
All fall under a $1000? What kind of standard is that? MY laptop was under $1000 when new, and similar laptops are now in the ~$750 range. Why get an underpowered ultraportable when a normal laptop costs just as much?
The assertion that Asus "flipped the laptop world on its head with a stupidly low price point" made in this article simply isn't true. Sub-$500 laptops have been around for some time now. And, for the money, the Asus really isn't even a particularly good deal. For $100 more, you can buy a laptop with an actual 60GB hard drive and much more muscular processor. The main advantage to the Eee isn't its price point, but the fact that it is very small (and the screen is perhaps too small as the parent points out), light, and durable (since it has a solid-state hard drive).
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MSI Wind, £225
If there's one laptop that could seriously end the Eee's reign, it's the MSI Wind. We believe it could be the perfect blend of portability and usability, due to the fact it's slightly larger than an Eee PC, with a bigger keyboard and a choice of screen sizes.
Eight- and 10-inch versions are available, as are Silverthorne CPUs ranging from 1GHz to 1.5GHz. You even get a choice of hard drive types: there are solid-state models for anyone prone to dropping things, and 2.5-inch models for anyone who wants to store lots of multimedia files.
Best of all, the entry-level Wind is set to cost just 299 (£225), or 699 (£530) for the high-end model. Like all good uber-portables, it's available in a variety of colours including blue, silver and pink.
That sounds like the cream of the crop. MSI is a fairly quality manufacturer, and they are offering multiple configurations. The Cloudbook was promising up until I got my hands on one, however, and UGH! You can't get around that funky micro trackpad on one side and clicking buttons on another, and the damn thing gets hotter than my MacBook when crunching video. And that wasn't under any load at all.
Really, what people need to compare the Eee and its progeny to is not full-sized laptops but PDAs. The Eee, the Wind, the OLPC, etc. are more like overgrown Palms than mini notebooks. If you look at them that way, suddenly their uses present themselves. If you expect full-sized laptop performance, particularly desktop replacement laptop performance, from one of these, you are in for a rude awakening.
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In America, maybe, but Sinclair made an absolute killing with those machines in the UK. The ZX80 and ZX81 pretty much established the home computer market, and then the Spectrum turned up with colour graphics and became the standard machine for a generation of gamers and hackers. It was a long time before Nintendo managed to break that market; even as late as the 16-bit era, the Amiga was serious competition for the SNES and Mega Drive.
The interesting thing about that era was that these machines were largely incompatible with each other, but that didn't matter so much - they were cheap. Vastly cheaper than the contemporary IBM and Apple machines. Will the mass market accept compatibility troubles from a non-Microsoft machine, if it means they can have it for peanuts? Quite possibly.
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Prices for these usable machines seem to start at ~150USD. I don't understand, then, why I /still/ can't find a sub-100USD thin client device with VGA out, understands X11, WiFi and has USB inputs for keyboard/mouse. These seem to start at $250, with $400-500 being more common -- especially among those that can connect to an X11 server. Given that they surely can't be cheaper to make than a fully functional mini-laptop with HDD, why the hell don't they exist?