Bored with making MacBooks for Steve Jobs, one day Asus decided to create its own stylish laptop and flog it on the cheap. The result was the Eee PC -- a Linux-based ultraportable notebook that wowed consumers, shocked rival manufacturers and is slowly but surely revolutionising an industry.
But Asus is no longer alone. 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. They're all real products, and a few are already available, so we've included links to our full reviews for those.
AsusEee PC 701, £220 The Eee has racked up hundreds of thousands of sales in a relatively short space of time. It's portable, attractive, versatile and has completely flipped the laptop world on its head with a stupidly low price point.
In exchange for a touch over £200, the Eee provides a Pentium M 900MHz CPU, 512MB of RAM, Wi-Fi, a 7-inch 800x480-pixel display, and enough Linux software to keep you busy for weeks. It's awesome value.
Okay, the hype overshadowed the fact that it's rather slow, sometimes unreliable and nearly impossible to type on if you had grown-up fingers, but these are minor details. In the long run it'll be recognised as one of the decade's most important pieces of tech design. Its rivals -- including the Eee PC 901 -- will have a very hard time topping it.
Elonex One(aka GeCube Genie), £99
Let's kick things off with the Elonex One, which many geeks will also know as the GeCube Genie Jr. It's designed for school
children, but will no doubt attract a much wider demographic thanks to its ludicrously low price.
The One is an attractive little unit that weighs in at 900g. Elonex
says it's designed to be kid-proof in that it's shock resistant, has no
moving parts and is very reliable. The main components are housed
behind the 7-inch 800x480-pixel display. You get a 300MHz LNX Code 8
Mobile CPU -- no, we've never heard of it either -- 128MB of DDR2
memory and 1GB of flash memory. An enhanced version of the laptop,
called the One Plus, ships with 256MB of RAM and 2GB of storage.
What else do you get for fewer than 10,000 pennies? Well, 802.11b/g
Wi-Fi is standard, as is wired 10/100 Ethernet, two USB2.0 ports,
built-in speakers, and the keyboard's removable so you can use the One
like a tablet PC. The display isn't touch-sensitive, so you'll have
to use a 'mouse emulator' -- aka nipple -- round the back. The
whole thing runs on the Linux Linos 2.6.21 operating system, which
comes with a variety of productivity, media and education software.
The One is never going to be the fastest computer in the world, and
we're sceptical that it'll be without its problems, but you really
can't go wrong for £99. It's available in pink, green, silver, white or
black, and will be released in July 2008. Pre-order yours from the
Elonex Web site now for a £10 deposit.
Packard Bell EasyNote XS(aka VIA Nanobook), £399
Originally the Everex Cloudbook, this petite laptop now goes by many different names: 'EasyNote XS', 'VIA Nanobook', and courtesy of some potty-mouthed Cravers: 'horrible pile of turd'. That last bit is very unfair -- the XS is pretty accomplished.
It's tiny: just 230x171x29mm and it weighs 950g. It uses a 7-inch display with an 800x480-pixel native resolution, a 1.2GHz VIA C7-M CPU, 1GB of RAM and a 30GB 2.5-inch hard drive, which
And French law, instead of giving the consumer the right to buy where they can get something the cheapest, instead forces the consumer to pay more for a product than they need to. This law allowed small bookstores to stay alive. You might see this as an attack on free market (which it is), but it is also allowing French people to buy books they would have a hard time to find otherwise. In the US, on the other hand, the big stores are healthy, but finding something which is not mainstream is rather hard, especially outside the big cities.
Now, should this be done for every product? I don't think so. The consumer who wants something eclectic doesn't have a right to get it (even more at a reasonable price), like fresh fruits at a market (French don't have laws to maintain the markets and they mostly buy their food at large shopping centers). However, Lang decided that the culture had to be treated differently, which I agree with, even though it goes against the conception of free market (as others have stated, free market doesn't solve everything).
Well, the iAudio players pretty much fulfills all the requirements. Mine (G3) is a UMS device, plays OGG, has a radio and does not contain any DRM that I know of. My only concern is that the joystick is pretty fragile.
As someone else noted, the iRiver (not with the original firmware, though, or at least in Europe) do too (at least those that I know of).
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Bored with making MacBooks for Steve Jobs, one day Asus decided to create its own stylish laptop and flog it on the cheap. The result was the Eee PC -- a Linux-based ultraportable notebook that wowed consumers, shocked rival manufacturers and is slowly but surely revolutionising an industry.
But Asus is no longer alone. 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. They're all real products, and a few are already available, so we've included links to our full reviews for those.
Asus Eee PC 701, £220
The Eee has racked up hundreds of thousands of sales in a relatively short space of time. It's portable, attractive, versatile and has completely flipped the laptop world on its head with a stupidly low price point.
In exchange for a touch over £200, the Eee provides a Pentium M 900MHz CPU, 512MB of RAM, Wi-Fi, a 7-inch 800x480-pixel display, and enough Linux software to keep you busy for weeks. It's awesome value.
Okay, the hype overshadowed the fact that it's rather slow, sometimes unreliable and nearly impossible to type on if you had grown-up fingers, but these are minor details. In the long run it'll be recognised as one of the decade's most important pieces of tech design. Its rivals -- including the Eee PC 901 -- will have a very hard time topping it.
Elonex One (aka GeCube Genie), £99
Let's kick things off with the Elonex One, which many geeks will also know as the GeCube Genie Jr. It's designed for school children, but will no doubt attract a much wider demographic thanks to its ludicrously low price.
The One is an attractive little unit that weighs in at 900g. Elonex says it's designed to be kid-proof in that it's shock resistant, has no moving parts and is very reliable. The main components are housed behind the 7-inch 800x480-pixel display. You get a 300MHz LNX Code 8 Mobile CPU -- no, we've never heard of it either -- 128MB of DDR2 memory and 1GB of flash memory. An enhanced version of the laptop, called the One Plus, ships with 256MB of RAM and 2GB of storage.
What else do you get for fewer than 10,000 pennies? Well, 802.11b/g Wi-Fi is standard, as is wired 10/100 Ethernet, two USB2.0 ports, built-in speakers, and the keyboard's removable so you can use the One like a tablet PC. The display isn't touch-sensitive, so you'll have to use a 'mouse emulator' -- aka nipple -- round the back. The whole thing runs on the Linux Linos 2.6.21 operating system, which comes with a variety of productivity, media and education software.
The One is never going to be the fastest computer in the world, and we're sceptical that it'll be without its problems, but you really can't go wrong for £99. It's available in pink, green, silver, white or black, and will be released in July 2008. Pre-order yours from the Elonex Web site now for a £10 deposit.
Packard Bell EasyNote XS (aka VIA Nanobook), £399
Originally the Everex Cloudbook, this petite laptop now goes by many different names: 'EasyNote XS', 'VIA Nanobook', and courtesy of some potty-mouthed Cravers: 'horrible pile of turd'. That last bit is very unfair -- the XS is pretty accomplished.
It's tiny: just 230x171x29mm and it weighs 950g. It uses a 7-inch display with an 800x480-pixel native resolution, a 1.2GHz VIA C7-M CPU, 1GB of RAM and a 30GB 2.5-inch hard drive, which
Well, the iAudio players pretty much fulfills all the requirements. Mine (G3) is a UMS device, plays OGG, has a radio and does not contain any DRM that I know of. My only concern is that the joystick is pretty fragile. As someone else noted, the iRiver (not with the original firmware, though, or at least in Europe) do too (at least those that I know of).