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Sub-$100 Laptops Have Finally Arrived
Roman Phalanx writes "OLPC had promised that it would be possible to mass produce a sub-$100 laptop. The folks at OLPC tried to realize that dream by re-imagining what a laptop looks like. How large of screen and keyboard it has. What OS runs on the laptop. Now that OLPC has decided to super size their systems to run Windows XP, the $100 price point has slipped beyond their reach. A Chinese firm has realized that dream. Taking the best from both the OLPC and EeePC. They ditched x86 compatibility and switched to a MIPS architecture to further reduce production costs. HiVision has managed to create a UMPC that sells right now for $120.00. They say they have refined the manufacturing process and have learned from building this laptop how to mass produce a laptop that will sell for $98.00." (More below, including a link to a video of the device.)
"The new HiVision MiniNote is due out in October of 2008. TechVideoBlog has footage of one of these Mini Notes being shown off at a trade show in Germany. They have managed to borrow a unit overnight for a while and have done a quick review on it.
Overall it looks pretty good. MIPS based processor, WiFi, 1GB flash storage, it runs Linux, has 3 USB ports, Ethernet, SDHC card reader, audio in and out, multi-tabbed Firefox browser support and Abiword for word processing. Running a custom Chinese Linux distrubution named Xip.
Overall performance seems snappy and no problems connecting to WiFi. Other than the lack of a webcam and the Adobe Flash Player it seems perfect. For $98 it looks like quite a value."
Overall performance seems snappy and no problems connecting to WiFi. Other than the lack of a webcam and the Adobe Flash Player it seems perfect. For $98 it looks like quite a value."
Here is a quick link to a youtube video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKQbN6tpYXw
And I promise, it's not a rick rolling.
looks like 800x480 is becoming the new 1280×1024.
never bring a twinkie to a food fight.
Strange times.
A pc for under 100$ and a shiny phone for over 400$. both made in china.
I think from past experience (Linux 64-bit) that we'll be waiting a long time for Flash on this one... other than that it seems like a great idea to do what they did!
Power corrupts the few, while weakness corrupts the many.
Ahh, but can you type on the damn thing? I love my Eee, but I hate using it. The keys are too damn small to type on. Screen size I can live with, but IMHO it's only good for a few non-interactive things. (I know I could add an external keyboard, but that defeats the portability that I was after.
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
Yea, this laptop is so good with WIFI I got first post!
No precompiled apps to download, since no one has download links for MIPS and no proprietary company would bother with such a tiny market. You're going to end up compiling everything you want from source and hoping it works. It will sell only to a subset of geeks.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
If it doesn't run the Flash plugin, it's out of the Interweb game for most people. I'm sure someone will port GNU Gnash to it, but that's hardly a substitute. If the buyer only cares about some specific function like word processing, this might not matter. But the usual idea of netbooks is that they are more or less fully web-enabled.
No flash? That's a feature, not a bug!
Game! - Where the stick is mightier than the sword!
So... "Sub-$100 Laptops Have Finally Arrived". And yet... they haven't. It'd be nice (although, apparently, unrealistic) to think that we've learnt by now not to give credence to vaporware. Color me unimpressed.
The best newspaper in the USA: the Anderson Valley Advertiser.
OK after watching the video i can only say: totally want!!
Power corrupts the few, while weakness corrupts the many.
OLPC was a noble idea, but one that was fundamentally flawed; this is because the specs did not originate from the areas of the world that would be using it but were spun out of a pie in the sky engineering lab. The scale of the OLPC was immense and impractical and the fact that they attempted it at all they should be given alot of credit for dealing with the political, economic and technical problems.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
Finally, the reds will now be able to download my life simply and easily. Point and click, just like M$!!
For those who don't want to bother with DivX, or would like to savor the irony of watching a flash ad/review for a computer that won't play flash, here's the video
Although the laptop is probably a great piece of engineering for something that has a sub-$100 price tag, the decision to go with a MIPS processor is probably going to relegate the device to niche markets - census taking, for example, or maybe something along the lines of inventory control.
The lack of official (and I emphasize "official") Flash 9 and Adobe PDF support would probably be a deal breaker for Joe Average Home and Business user.
Granted, a most of the PDF spec is now available royalty-free, and an FOSS Flash plug-in has been released (and is under continuing development), but I doubt that is going to put sway too many folk's purchasing decisions.
The MIPS processor will probably doom it forever to the realm of Geekdom...
I will admit now that I know next to nothing about MIPS processors. However, if it isn't compatable with x86 apps it will need quite a large repository of pre-compiled apps or MIPS will be it's downfall.
Sooo... where are they available? A quick google search yields nothing on either the currently available models or this one.
"Sub-$100 Laptops Have Finally Arrived"
Tagged !arrived...
This shows on the YouTube video at 03:58:
400MHz/32bit CPU
128M/64M RAM
1GB NAND Flash
Linux or WinCE
7" 800x480 display
Wireless LAN 802.11b/g
10/100M ethernet
Well, I'm out. I'll wait for something not developed by a company in that regime. Sure, I can't avoid China entirely, but I can do...well...what I can.
Thank you Dave Raggett
...when there's a link to BUY ONE. Now. Right now. I have my credit card at the ready. Where can I buy one, even at the $120 price point that they are supposedly selling "right now" for?
Well? Link or it didn't happen. Otherwise, this is just another fucking slashvertisement.
With spending like this, exactly what are "conservatives" conserving?
I think it's extremely safe to say this is completely vaporware hype, with no substance at all.
Laptops that just about exactly match the specs and description of this supposed $100 machine, currently retail for $250:
http://www.compsource.com/pn/3KRZ40074GB/3k_Computers_2340/
I fail to believe it's being sold at a 100% mark-up, or that any magic they can do in the next couple years is going to half the materials and production costs of a laptop.
It looks like a decent bit of hardware, but don't count on it getting significantly cheaper while you wait. Even if the price of the chips (Flash, CPU, RAM, etc.) suddenly drop dramatically (which is highly unlikely), you've still got to deal with the base cost of NiMH batteries, plastic, lights, keyboards, touch pads, power supplies, LCD displays, assembly (man hours aren't getting any cheaper), etc., etc.
If you want a low-end system, pay the $250. Don't wait for the vapor to clear.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
There have been sub $100 laptops on ebay for years. Furthermore most of them are better then the pieces of crap in these articles. Sure the batteries are sometimes shot, but most of them still work.
Hikery.net - The best hiking site ever. Made by yours truly.
Now an even wider demographic of computer illiterate dullards will be able to stumble their way into our arms for inane tech help.
looks like you can get one now from geeks.com http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid=ALPHA-400&cat=NBB
We always knew Comcast was corrupt, here's the proof: http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1909890&cid=34545432
The sub $100 dollar notebook niche appears to be a bit too specialized for the needs of most people. They have all had a couple of good features or component choices here and there but, at least IMHO, none of them has yet hit the sweet spot. The use of the MIPS processor is an interesting play and the 1GB flash drive is also interesting but perhaps not the most appropriate choice given the current cost and rewrite performance of solid state drives. There are also the usual complaints about keyboard and screen size. I think that they could do better by increasing the screen and keyboard size a bit and substituting a good magnetic notebook disk (~80 GB would be cheap) for the flash drive. The ideal price range would probably be somewhere between $250 - $500, anything less than $100 generates too many compromises to be of general purpose use (or at least that has been true thus far).
Editorializing from the headline, Roman Phalanx wrote
There's nothing "super" about losing one's software freedom. The XO was originally an educational project where even the computer the kids learn on could be part of the lessons. Switching to proprietary software means placing barriers on that education by telling the user that there are some things you weren't meant to know and shall be forbidden from learning, sharing, or changing to suit your needs. There's nothing good about that for the user, whose concerns outrank any proprietor. It is not society's job to placate software proprietors. The free software movement welcomes businesses that treat us as partners, not as a market to exploit. The free software community certainly gives businesses lots to work with and make money from.
Digital Citizen
Which is even MORE amazing since the dollar is worth HALF what it was 5 years ago!!!
because Windows CE used to exist for MIPS based mobile systems. So it can run a MIPS version of Windows CE or MIPS based Windows Mobile.
MIPS is one of the platform targets of AROS which will help turn it into a sub$100 Amiga laptop. I think the MIPS based AROS will have 68K emulation to run the old Amiga 68K programs on it via an emulator.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
At $350 per unit, It's not cost effective as a Sony PSP or Nintendo DS, but competitive to a mix between a QWERTY PDA with usable RAM/TV-out/redundant-expansion. In other words, it's a trade-off of a better Motorola A12000 CellPhone without the lock-in, more battery life, and better than the bulk of a laptop.
Did you miss the entire freakin' point of the story or what?
How we know is more important than what we know.
So, what's stopping Sugar from running on these things?
Not impressed. When they flipped it over, you could see the specs. 400 Mhz,1 gb flash drive, 3 hour battery life, 64 or 128 mb ram. I can get the same thing by going to an electronics salvage store and buying a junked laptop with the same specs for about $20, wipe out the windows 95 installation, and install linux.
Nobody need Flash!, It is a proprietary player, Better use Java with OpenJDK and it is GPL and it can compile for 64bit with out a problem and with the JRE6_10 have the same capabilities as Flash.
As someone said IPhone doesn't ship with Flash player and it is twice the price so the average Joe will not get an IPhone because have no flash? hahah.
2c.
Here's a link to the gentoo handbook for mips: http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/handbook-mips.xml
Once you start despising the jerks, you become one.
Debian has a mips port, where you can likely download precompiled packages just fine. http://www.debian.org/ports/mips/
Once you start despising the jerks, you become one.
.
OLPC sold less than 700,000 units by May 29th of this year. 80,000 of those sales were give one - get one promos.
--- almost exclusively targeting the Linux Geek.
The third world education minister simply wasn't buying into Linux, Sugar and a constructivist philosophy of education.
The "Give 1 Get 1" donation of $399 had a tax-deductible portion of $200 under US tax code as the XO-1 laptop delivered to the donor was valued at $199 by the OLPC Foundation."
One Laptop per Child
If you take OLPC at its word, then they never had a $100 Linux laptop - at least not at the "direct sale" price.
Or, you could buy a cell phone. Those can be had for ~$100+ in forms that do about as much as a $100 laptop would. Plus they call people.
In any case, it's no surprise - this has been possible for a long time. The question is whether the result is marketable. Will people want a 7-inch screen? Can they live with only 1 GB of storage? Each year, the specs of what you can buy with $100 get better - at this point, they're high enough that several companies think the product has become marketable.
Ignore my retarded parents. I was adopted.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, watch it -- I'm huge!
I've been wondering the same thing and I suspect that I'm going to do something weird. I did a lot of looking around for portable keyboards with good action, light weight, big enough keys, etc. and having looked at everybody from Adesso on up, I've concluded that I'll probably buy a UMPC of some sort with a not-quite-good-enough keyboard, get by with that when I really want to travel light, and carry one of the new Apple keyboards when I expect to do a lot of writing. The buggers are amazingly light and the action is sweet, though I neither want to pay eighty bucks nor have to trust Bluetooth. But, realistically, at some point in the next few months I'll be gritting my teeth and giving yet more of my money to the folks in Cupertino.
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
... can it run IRIX? :)
We apologize for the inconvenience.
I love how the author spins this as "now that OLPC has decided to super size their systems to run Windows XP, the $100 price point has slipped beyond their reach". OLPC has been above $100 since it began - in fact around $200, although I believe you have to pay $400 to actually get your hands on one because they want you to donate one in the process. Putting Windows on it was a business decision to make the thing more useful for actually teaching kids how to use computers, and might ultimately decease prices if it generates enough demand.
Seriously. Give me a basic Laptop with wordprocessor/spreadsheet/internet access and I'm in. Add a working VGA out and I'm in heaven.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
While it was necessary for the OLPC to be inexpensive, the more important design decision was about its power usage and ruggedness. It uses 2W in "normal" use:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OLPC_XO-1#Power_consumption
Given that the DC draw is 15W for charging you can use small solar cells. Very handy in countries were the electrical grid infrastructure is non-existent in many cases. (And mesh network helps communication where ISPs don't exist.)
Unless they're lying in the video, they've already sold over ten thousand of these puppies, or at least something that's about version 0.93 of it. That doesn't sound like vaporware to me.
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
http://mobile.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=954031&cid=24879831
With purchase of an expensive laptop.
Although the laptop is probably a great piece of engineering for something that has a sub-$100 price tag, the decision to go with a MIPS processor is probably going to relegate the device to niche markets - census taking, for example, or maybe something along the lines of inventory control.
Sony went with a MIPS processor for the PlayStation, PlayStation 2, and PlayStation Portable. Are they niche?
The lack of official (and I emphasize "official") Flash 9 and Adobe PDF support would probably be a deal breaker for Joe Average Home and Business user.
PSP has a MIPS processor and can run SWF.
True, but all it takes is a source repository
Not all software is Free or even available as source code. For example, what major retail video game has a Free engine?[1]
[1] I'm talking about games that are Free upon first publication, not id Tech based games that go Free half a decade later.
1 for a server and one for each kid.
Answering a bunch of things in one post. Firstly, there seems to be some people on slashdot who think that x86 is required in order to be a 'usable' platform. Well, it isn't so. Makromedia flash may or may not be available for MIPS, but that doesn't mean that users will not be able to use 'the web': because of limited bandwidth and censorship, much of the 'target demographic' for this computer won't be needed such functionality anyhow. But I believe a few things: 1) it behooves Macromedia to release players for a variety of architecture, lest they be left behind. 2) proves that open-source, and its ability to be compiled for a variety of architectures, has much value. 3) Perhaps we need an INSTRUCTION SET which is completely unencumbered by "intellectual property". I guess virtual machines can handle the translation, and later be put into silicon - remind you of Java? Hrm.
China has a lot of 'economic frontiers' left. A great portion of the country is still very primitive, left struggling in the remains of Maoism. There may be an effort in this country to refocus its efforts on internal development, and this PC might be a step towards it. I don't think it's quite there, though, as there seems to be a concentration on western (European/Roman/English) keyboards and displays. I am not saying that I want Red China to win (I actually want them to lose) but I am trying to foresee what's coming.
Lastly, I am not sure how much further the keyboard can shrink and still be practical. Sure, for kids it can be smaller, but even kids grow - and hence their fingers grow too large for the keyboard, and then the mini-laptop they were using starts causing damage to their fingers. That's no way to be - we need full sized keyboards, even in undeveloped countries, otherwise it will be only the midgets which will be able to type effectively.
So what's with the nod tag that's been thrown on the past couple of articles?
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
The deranged lunacy turned ranged a long time ago.
The core instruction set has had multiple sets of custom enhancements over the years, and can now do some pretty amazing stuff "in a single instruction."
Any x86 CPU you can buy at retail for at least the past three years IS a RISC CPU. x86 is just a compression/encryption format for RISC instructions, and there's not a single thing you can do with an x86 that can't be done on another architecture with similar hardware, and most likely cleaner and better. $50 million worth of R&D into any CPU design, architecture or instruction set will produce a roughly equivalent speedup. Since x86 is such a Charlie Foxtrot in the first place, starting with something cleaner is likely to produce even better performance.
It's the RISC methodology that can no longer keep up except under specific constraints to the problem set. That's why Apple switched to keep up in general-purpose and multimedia computing, and you'll find PowerPC only in embedded and HPC any more.
The only keeping up Apple needs to do is in IA-32 emulation and price. The same principle (commodity hardware means fewer hardware engineers and lower component costs) drove the commodity-based architecture of the Sun Ultra-5. It's ALL about money. It's always about money.
/. -- the Free Republic of technology.
I'm not certain if anyone remembers this? But I remember a Popular Science cover when the Timex Sinclair came out and people were crowing about the first "under $100" computer.
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
... you don't recharge it, you buy a new one.
There are currently NO developers using Beagleboard for MIPS development. They are using it for ARM and TIDSP development though.
and GP Wiz with two D-pads instead of normal fire buttons is better designed as a gaming system? Pandora at least had two analog pads and normal buttons.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
.kr is South Korea (i.e: not communist).
MIPS CPUs are very simple to design, if you're willing to accept the limitation of one instruction per clock. I once met the entire design team for a midrange MIPS CPU, and it was six people. When you look at a picture of the silicon, you can barely find the instruction decode and execute logic; it's a tiny fraction of the chip.
MIPS was overrun by the superscalar architectures, where you get more than one instruction per clock, at the cost of a huge increase in CPU logic complexity. The Pentium Pro design team was around 3000 people. (The Pentium II and III were basically Pentium Pro logic reworked for later fab processes.) It's amazing that x86 superscalar machines are even possible. (Think hard for a moment about what has to happen when you store into code just ahead of execution, which is fully supported by all x86 CPUs.) If you're willing to go superscalar, the simplicity goes away, and so does the advantage of the MIPS architecture.
But if you're willing to accept one instruction per clock, and a 2X code bloat over x86 (making all the instructions the same length means the register-to-register instructions take more bytes than they need), it's a simple way to build a CPU.
Did anyone here consider the fact that the $98 dollar price point is the wholesale price?
You will not be buying it for $98, the distrubutor you buy it from will be paying $98 dollars for it, and selling it to you at a markup.
Just that this appears to be footage of a commonplace wholesaler trade show.
Me being the geek that I am, I would have one of these in my house, I just got the Eee Box and I love it, and with this being different in processor and stuff I would love to tinker with it.
"Arrived" in the title, and "Due in October" in the text.
One of these things is not like the other... one of these things is not the same...
+++OK ATH
I do not think that word means what they think it does.
That culture sucks, slashdot culture is way better.
Shame they're tied to US$100 for this. If, instead, at the time they made the mandate for a laptop at US$100, they actually locked the price to the equivalent Euros or GBP, they'd have a much easier time at it.
-- I prefer the term "karma escort."
I was starting to wonder what could be cobbled together from all the, perfectly functional, yet slightly outdated/unwanted parts that must be floating around warehouses in Asia. My EEE PC serves me perfectly well. It's really an eye-opener how much you can do with systems that appear "limited" at first glance.
Nice, now to get it in BestBuy with a lid filling screen and full size keys. Don't need no Flash anyways.
Found your post, GT. Nice to see you. Nevermind those third-world mall walkers. They'ld go to the moon if they could save 75% off a 10 cent condomn.
And I thought I had a crosscompiling nightmare. Back in the days of StrongARM, we were using development tools on a SGI MIPS machine that would somtimes crap out on us. The crossdevelopment software we were using was capable, just the source lost and the random nuisance bugs couldn't be corrected but workedaround.
Don't need a desktop or laptop to be a software developer. What's with all the crosscompiler phobia today? A MIPS compiler run on a i386Wine ontop of qEMU hosted on a ARM makes my job possible right now, laughably. Perhaps the same people complaining above are the same that have lived on a steady diet of expensive development setups and expect a laptop under $100 made from a thirdworld company will makeup on their lost profits. The same also expect their software to appear without manlabor, and GPLd. Completly assinine and typical Microsoft doublespeak.
Hey, $120 is the new $100! With the way the economy is going, it'll only take a few days for this laptop to be a sub-$50 laptop!
These are not for "general purpose" computing as we slashdotters know it, these are for email, web and writing letters to aunt betty. They're not intended to play Doom 4 or run Windows Vista.
My mother in law is getting a netbook, and I think she's a very good example of a non-geek's perspective on these. She doesn't need to spend hundreds of pounds on a 8kg brick with 10 mins battery life and six zillion GB of storage space that claims to be a "Lap Top" - just to use the interweb, and she knows it, so as soon as she copped eyes on a netbook and found out that they were basically a portable internet thingy with a larger screen and keyboard than her mobile phone she was sold. The £100 (GBP) price range is exactly right for these machines in that respect - from the point of view who has a 19" mono CRT TV and is perfectly happy with that and doesnt see the need to fork out for a 50" 1080P HD Flat screen.
I've said this before on slashdot, too many geeks and product reviewers see these and their laptop-like form factors and treat them like stripped down dumb machines that would sit in the corner dribbling whilst all the supposedly "proper" laptops called them names. When that's not what they are - they're much more akin to souped-up PDAs with keyboards. And as someone who still owns an 8MB Psion Revo i've been dying for this sort of thing for years!
I already have an Xbox, Playstation, Server and Desktop. They're mainly used for watching video, playing games, developing and general-purpose computing, respectively. I don't need one of these mini-laptops to do any of that, i want it so I can check ebay from the sofa, look up recipes from the kitchen and send emails from the garden.
As a final thought it's probably worth bearing in ming that the specs of these inparticular almost exactly match the *development* system I used to use 8 years ago, except I had 8GB of drive space there instead of 1GB - but most of that was empty or taken up with quake 2 and half life modding resources! I managed to run SUSE (5 or 6 IIRC) on it perfectly adequately and email, surf and write letters with no performance issues.
If this is the model I think of it there's a fledgling site dedicated to it and it's siblings at littlelinuxlaptop.com - including how to get root access and such like. I can't wait to get mine!
If you don't risk failure you don't risk success.
To make a laptop this cheap, you're not going to have much money left over to responsibly deal with the industrial waste you produce are you?
In fact here it is for just $180..
http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid=ALPHA-400&cat=NBB
And as always, if ever sold in europe, the price will as usual translate to about â100-150 ($144-216). Useless
not $98 but sounds a lot like the same device
http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid=ALPHA-400&cat=NBB
What other kinds of games are you going to run on a $95 laptop ? Crysis ?
Games with PS1-class graphics, such as MySims and Mario Kart DS, already run on a $130 handheld.
is that XO HAD a chance. By trying to work with MS, they had to increase the size of everything, which brings up the costs to the same as most major companies. Now, hivision is doing on the hardware what XO was suppose to do. And I am betting that some others or even hivision will port SOME of the apps over, and then take control of XO.
Basically, a companies willingness to work with MS is becoming a predictive value of how long the company will last.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Yes those products are niche, they are gaming only
PSP homebrewers would tell you that the big reason Sony computer entertainment systems are commonly considered "gaming-only" is because of the lockout chip that verifies Sony's digital signature on each executable. A jailbroken PSP can do and does a lot more than gaming. I take it that unlike the PSP, this laptop won't have the lockout chip. So what wouldn't you call "niche"?
I'm going to China in November, and I've already asked my friends there to try to find these. I will report back if I manage to get my hands on one.
I think the 0890 (8.9 inch) would make a great little security testing device.
The 8.9 inch and 10 inch models have 1024x600. It's only the 8 inch and 7 inch that have 800x480.
The 8.9 inch model's specs are identical to the 10 inch except the physical size and the weight. Both have the same size HD, same screen layout (1024x600), 3 USB 2.0 ports, etc.
I'll be in China in early November. I plan to pick up one of the 8.9 inch ones. I will report back when I return.
It sez the $120 is available now. I'm willing to spend an extra $20 to play with it today. How do I get one?
I want one of these for network tech work. I do some in-home networking work, and I would love one of these. Lighter than a laptop, running a full Linux TCP/IP stack, cheap enough to not worry about breaking it.
From my standpoint, these are perfect for field work. Hell if I can get KIAX, SSH, and Firefox to work on it reliably, that's 95% of what I need a laptop for onsite.
Pointing out that there is a comparable alternative available on a one-at-a-time basis is *not a valid criticism of these products.
Pretend that GP, instead of just being a tweakhead who wants to fiddle with a UMPC, is tasked with fitting out 1200 employees with cheap laptops.
I assume you'd suggest that he needs to make 1199 more friends with old laptops?
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
Older model during back-to-school sales. Standard everything, but small.
HIVLOL
There are currently NO developers using Beagleboard for MIPS development
Oh, I don't know. There might be some. They're probably very confused about why none of their code is working though...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Seriously, just how many fucking times am I going to see the same bloody laptop with a different name. It's a Elonex ONEt / Bestlink Alpha-400
Slap a webcam (with Skype pre-loaded) and the Adobe Flash Player it seems perfect (even if it running a flavor of Linux) and put a price tag of $100-$150 and I would buy it at the drop of a hat. HEAR THAT... Do not just slap it out at sell it at $500! I will be buy a regular laptop at that point.
My Sig indicates the end of the comment I posted.
That GP2x Wiz is from a South Korean company, actually there office is pretty close to where I work, I'll have to go check it out. It's great they're running linux, I was checking out an event that Asus put on for the eeePC and it was basically impossible to find one running Linux. The staff all said they sold them with Windows. So while this is offtopic, at least the post proved a little bit useful.
Interesting that you've noticed that trend....
I've suspected the same thing, though I didn't track the visitors to any of the web sites I've put together.
I think one big issue has been the lack of real "resolution independence" in full use in major operating systems. This was promised for OS X before 10.5 Leopard was released, but then never really materialized. And in Windows, you can change the default of 96DPI to something larger, but that amounts to magnifying EVERYTHING drawn on the display - so I'm not sure why that's really beneficial over just selecting a lower resolution (thereby achieving the same effect, while reducing the load on the video card and system - since it has fewer pixels to refresh and draw)?
I know at my workplace, at least 1 out of 3 employees is running in 800x600 because it's the lowest resolution they can use that still fits a "usable" amount of information on the screen at one time. They want everything to look bigger, making it easier on the eyes -- and buying larger LCD displays didn't address their problem, since it just meant higher and higher native resolutions.
From your comment:
"Is the thing not x86 compatible?"
From the summary of the article you are commenting on:
"They ditched x86 compatibility..."
The interviewer is just terrible. How is it that this is the only guy in the internets providing info on this? Anyway, the linux distro in the vid looks like xandros that comes with the asus eeepc 900. I'm not sure it is is xandros but it looks just like that. The first thing I'd do is wipe that crap and install something else on there with an 8gb sd card or something. And once again ... the interviewer was just plain horrible.
Yea those Gamepark consoles are quite good, in their first inception. Two friends of mine have opposite of eachother a GP32x and a GPx2, if I remember the models right. They each bought unreleate keyboards to attach to them, as though a PDA-sized console. Around ~USD200 to buy is not bad, and eBay has a number of vendors selling a dwindling number. GamePark was split into two companies, whereas one is government subsidized if I remember correctly. So be aware that there are two competing products of similar nature but different motives. It's kind of like Micros~1 vs Micros~2.gov. I don't know what form of law that other poster was saying about .kr being a non-comunist domain, as I assert that all internet domains outside of .com are intentionally of a nature that is of an administrative body looking for self-preservance through a quasi-civil presence initiated from a United Nations treaty for their present with ICANN.
I would see http://southkorea.com a more probable avenue for a customary entrance to that province, without the confidence-building measures of any administrative body and their gleaning. I see technology subsidy as a form to be broken with anti-trust proceedings; somthing is non-competitive about it, resources being misused (and some would consider human beings to be a resource, if you know what I mean). It's the same in the agriculture industry, with "agribusiness" style farming doing more to hurt the economy as the weakening hand of their USDA GMO'd products; what with the price of corn already sky-rocket because of the anticipation that 500lbs of corn to ~20 actual gallons of Methanol produced/expected to be converted, which will allow none be able collect that stable off market. 500lbs will feed 4 men for a year. Everywhere I look there is a subsidy in an industry, driving the market value down and then inflating it disproportionate to the published money-supply of the actual value and endorsement of product to a legal tender offset to lawful money and warehouse receipts. Anyways...
Of'course, only on SLASHDOT will those earlier posters be able to get there censure of +5 by using useless sarcasm. Did I read the article without posting, and why are they asking me to read it for them?
view webpages, read e-mail, listen to music, maybe watch video.
"Joe User": 90%
90%? Bullshit. There are many different kinds of users. 90% just want to read email, music and video? Holy FUD!
And gamers are a sub-set of 10%? WOW. You need to get out into the real world more often man. Or lay down the crack pipe.
You're insulting a huge chunk of the population that isn't dumb, understands there are different operating systems, but still doesnt care about linux. Is that so freaking hard to grasp?
And if you think there cant be geeks and nerds who can grasp kernel architectur, understand programming at a deep level, understand what linux is all about but still prefer microsoft technologies, then all you are is a FOSS zealot.
Try this one too : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBGIQ7ZuuiU
It's not as informative, but his voice isn't quite so funny.
Ok, so where can i get one, today.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Some people prefer RISC and wouldn't consider it a limitation.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Its not late, that is not a sub $100 laptop.
You know I was GIVEN an old laptop years ago.
I guess that magically somehow invalidates the fact that they can *make* a new laptop for $100 the same way some deal that requires you to buy a several thousand dollar laptop does.
Unless there is some mass market where people are buying these expensive laptops and reselling the $99 extra ones its not very much use.
Its like claiming that mobile phones cost $0 to manufacture.
cat
Why is parent post +5 funny? I would mod it +5 insightful.
I, like many others from what I could gather from a quick google of "digital photo frame driver", was intrigued by the recent news that there is a huge glut of digital photo frame devices and that the average selling price is in the sub-thirty dollar range for the 7" part.
At that price point these things are getting close to the average retail price of a twenty character monochrome textmode LED display for hobbyist electronics projects. The question, of course, is the video driver and my first tentative googling didn't turn up much more than other people wondering the same thing.
With the advent of all these new SOC platforms like the Atom and Nvidia Tegra that include integrated video hardware within the SOC package it certainly seems like we're getting very close to ultra low cost homebrew SOC systems with repurposed digital photo frame video output. These could make for some great devices.
The trick will be in hitching the SOC chips which tend to come in fine pitched BGA packaging to spread-out boards using toaster oven SMT techniques to get to the pins and then identifying the input connections on some common digital photo frame devices. If anybody has one of these and does a teardown to see how they have wired the microcontroller/SOC to the digital photo frame please post links back to here.
>The real question for me is the usefulness of it. >That thing looks like it's slightly larger than a >Nintendo DS,
7 inch is the screen on the original EEE that I got last winter. So its much bigger than a DS.
Thanks for playing.
No, it's like giving someone a book and then forbidding them from obtaining the knowledge to make their own books or modifying the book you gave them so it can suit their needs.
You seem to misunderstand the point of freedom. Just because most computer users aren't hackers and have no desire to become hackers doesn't mean they should be prohibited from being hackers to the degree they want to be one (not all jobs require serious programming skills, some jobs like translation can be done without editing code at all). Proprietary software always prohibits one from doing what they want with their software, even simple things like sharing a verbatim copy with someone else. Protecting freedom means thinking beyond your immediate desires and your own view of the world, realizing that you can't know what you'll want to do in the future and others want different things than you so you're better off retaining freedoms even if you don't exercise them yourself. In computer software the freedoms you throw away could be the freedoms someone wants when they get software from you.
I wouldn't trade away my freedom of speech even if I happened to agree with what my government was doing and therefore had no need to protest.
As for needing details of food production, you probably need that more than you think. Some people want to know if there is something in the wine that shouldn't be there. This information allows them to find wine that was free of pollutants. Some people care about the plight of the workers and other customers when they buy products, so they will use their consumer power (small as it is) to help shape a better world.
Digital Citizen
the inverse of 3/4 is 4/3 and 4/3 times $100 is $133.33...
Question: Does the unit have some sort of terminal and ssh client? If so, I'm in. I can work an entire day from the terminal with alpine, finch, and epic4 running from my personal server.
forget flash, the real important item - can it run CSS, Crysis, Cod4 - not buying..