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"World's Cheapest Laptop" Available in Bulk Only

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the if-it-looks-like-a-fish-and-smells-like-a-fish dept.

BobB writes to tell us that what one company is calling the "world's cheapest laptop" is now available at the price of $130. Unfortunately if you want to buy one you will also need to convince 99 of your closest friends to go in on an order with you since you cannot buy in less than units of 100. We have covered several "cheap laptops" in the past and many have turned out to be fraudulent, so especially with a large up-front cost, buyer beware. "The Impulse NPX-9000 laptop has a 7-inch screen and comes with the Linux OS. It has a 400MHz processor, 128M bytes of RAM, 1G byte of flash storage and an optional wireless networking dongle. It includes office productivity software, a Web browser and multimedia software."

6 of 357 comments (clear)

  1. Re:So group buy... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    http://www.pledgebank.com/

  2. Re:Looks pretty poor by adisakp · · Score: 5, Informative

    The article doesn't mention a VGA port but at that price I'd be amazed if it has one.

    Be amazed!!! There's a picture of the ports on the pruchase site (linked to from the artcle) and the specs and yes, one of the ports is external VGA.

  3. Re:Wow - low specs... by PlatyPaul · · Score: 5, Informative

    Extra dodgy.

    The website for Carapelli Ltd. (the supplier) is blank, the street address is a P.O. Box, although they list phone (886-2-25969225) and fax numbers (886-2-25941330) which may be active.

    --
    Misery loves company. Online misery loves unsuspecting random strangers.
  4. Here's a cheaper one... by argent · · Score: 4, Informative

    http://www.alibaba.com/product-gs/206720976/7_mini_laptop.html

    $90-$180 FOB Shanghai, QTY 500. Runs Linux or Windows CE.

    Looks like they have variants of this from 7" to 12.1", which is why the range of prices.

  5. These have been around for a while by hee+gozer · · Score: 5, Informative

    Actually you can buy the same ones from Bestlink. They give bulk discounts too, but you don't have to buy in bulk from them.

    The manufacturer of these notebooks keeps slapping on different labels, but they're all pretty much the same, except for some minor aesthetic and firmware differences.

    I've compared one of them (from yet another reseller, with yet another unknown brand slapped on the back) to my EeePC 701 and here's what I found:

    Pros:
      - Cheaper then the Eee
      - Smaller and lighter, even when compared with the 701
      - Screen is very bright, even with the Eee at its brightest, the el cheapo is still brighter, see picture)

    Cons:
      - No onboard wlan although it comes with a usb wlan device
      - 400MHz mipsel as opposed to a 600 or 900MHz IA32 CPU in the Eee's
      - No frozen bubble (???)

  6. Re:No wonder it's cheap by FamineMonk · · Score: 4, Informative

    Hell, modern PDAs approach the specs of this thing.

    Yep heres two.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N800

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N810

    Granted it is an ARM CPU but its still the same clock speed. You can pick up the N800's for 190-210 in some places and I'm sure >200 on eBay.