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New Web-Based Netbook From Litl — Based On Clutter, Uncluttered
cananian writes "The webbook company of Gnome's own Havoc Pennington (with a healthy dose of ex-Nokia and ex-OLPC engineers) finally shed its secrecy today, with a new web site and an article in the WSJ. Technical specs on the hardware were found by Engadget last week, and now comes a bit more information on the software behind the UI. Most of the client software is written in JavaScript with GTK/Clutter bindings, and the UI has some superficial similarities to Pentagram's designs for OLPC's Sugar."
Why would anyone spend $700 buy a device that is dependent on the web to function, when a netbook costs half and can access the web and still function when offline?
Really? Why?
It looks like a regular Atom netbook... Why pay $700.00USD when you can get a netbook with similar specs for half that price...
No sig for the moment.
Cute; but I'm really not seeing ~$500 worth of improvement over a mini9 running Moblin. Or buying a netbook for normal use, a chumby for widgets, and booze with the rest.
For $699 I can get two eee 10" netbooks. Forget it!
This is a classic example of what happens when a bunch of engineers get together and they're all so dead on convinced that they've got the next great idea that they don't stop for 15 minutes to look at the market, learn what their potential customers actually want, or even write up a business plan. No one is going to pay $700 for one of these. It's just not going to work. How is a salesman at Best Buy supposed to talk me into buying a device that has no hard drive, a tiny screen, stores all of my data out on the Internet, and doesn't run Microsoft Office when there's a cool looking 15" laptop siting right beside it for the same price? It's just not going to happen. Mark my words. This will all end in tears.
Yes, you can.
Check on the new Ubuntu Server 9.10. It does have all the tools you need to create a private cloud.
Scientia est Potentia
This is going to be more awesome than WebTV! Because old people REALLY DO want to use computers... despite not being able to use a cell phone.
I foresee a not so Litl flop on the horizon.
the folks from Litl started setting up their demo table. I glanced over and saw that they had a small gadget that looked like a laptop (appeared to be the size of of a Macbook Air) with a flip screen. As I was reading an interesting article, I overheard some explanation of what the machine did and I was tempted to get up and check it out as I am always open to new gadgets. However, that temptation quickly went away when I overheard the price being quoted after the explanation of what it did. For a good five or ten minutes I put my reading material aside and tried to imagine just what market this device is trying to cater to that one would be able to justify paying $695 (the price I overheard) for. In my quest, I came up empty handed and promptly went back to my reading. At lunch time I got up and left without so much as glancing at the demo table. I doubt any reasonable person will spend more than a minute in the same quest before they promptly dismiss it.
If this was ARM based, I would probably jump on it (and it would probably be a little cheaper) but it is just the standard netbook with a fancy interface. There is plenty of fancy interfaces around so I don't know how this Litl plans to compete.
There is a lack of good ARM based netbooks! Always Innovating has the only half decent one.