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Hmmm.....

Not much info to go on, really.

It's good to see more manufacturers offering these type of options. Most of these seem to be supplementary stuff, good on the road but not quite a complete desktop replacement (unless it runs on a lightweight, Xfce based Linux distro)..

Dell's competitors will probably announce similar stuff soon. So far we have Asus, Acer, HP, Sony and now Dell. The VIA/Intel battle seems to be shaping up nicely, which bodes well for us consumers. Still waiting for the dual-Atom offerings, though.

Also waiting to see how Ubuntu Netbook Remix will turn out.

mainstream manufacturers can churn these out but if the cost is not around USD $299, it won't sell ... well maybe some amount. Right now small laptops cost more than their larger counterparts - either because of the screen, HDD, or processor. Hope it the price keeps going down and they have SD slots for us swap out OS on demand.

Lots of little asterisks directing one to the notes on page 16, but there were only 13 slides. What's up with that?

...as in "DELI"???



AH HAHAHA!!!!!

Sorry folks, I just had to. Would you like Pastrami with your ULCPC?

If I buy one of those machines I don't care much about specs or looks, but I want it to do as well as my old Game Boy, 16 years and still going. If it is as fragile or more fragile than normal laptops I won't bother.
Portable devices must be mistreatable or not be.

$299 for that guy? I was about 2 hours from buying an EEE 900. Find me a pre-order form for that Dell

As long as I can run FreeBSD on it (and that means .. everything works out of the box).. the 12.1 inch monitor version has my money.

I've been looking a lot at these UMPCs lately, and if they can make the E Video+ 399$ it'll definitely be a winner. Asus has lost it on the price with its new line of EEEs, Aspire One lacks bluetooth, HP Mini-note is too expensive, and the MSI Wind doesn't have a SSD.

"E" is the new "i".

did any one really think that asus stands a chance when they started raising the price? They might have gotten the ball rolling but it's about to crush them if they don't get their s*** together. And Dell is hardly their only problem. But a 12" screen sound really good. It makes for a small notebook that you can pretty much take anywhere, low price and well it's fast enough to be used as a note taking / movie watching / whatever gadget. Sure you won't be breaking speed records with this thing and it will feel slow compared to your workstation but it's ok for when you just have to change something in your source code or read that report that your boss gave you just before the party. 8 and 10" is just too small for excel among other things.

Edited 2008-06-14 22:02 UTC

Well, 12" screen might be fine for Excel, but takes the computer out of the UMPC range which ends at 10". Personally I think the 10" screen is about right for e-mail, web surfing, etc. that these things are designed to do. The 7" screen on the Eee (original 4G) really isn't bad, but the keyboard is a killer. I want something that can be carried around without much thought, not lugged around like my Thinkpad.

I think the hype around these "Netbooks" or "subnotebooks" or whatever the latest buzzword this week has made people lose sight of the big picture. Too many people are listening to the business people and the enthusiasts and not enough of them have noticed their lips aren't moving. Anyone getting excited about these "new" devices is missing the forest for the trees.

Look at the ASUS Eee--does anyone remember the original selling point promised for these devices? Sure they can claim this wasn't their fault, it was the falling dollar...the rasing costs of LCDs... Besides they and their supporters will say, the ASUS Eee was really about selling enough hardware to make ASUS one of the the top four hardware sellers in the world, not really about selling cheap laptops... To wish I must admit, ASUS has succeeded admirably--if this was indeed their actual goal.

I no longer think that to be the case.

Everyone who hails ASUS as this wild pioneer discovering the market no one knew was their had either forgotten history, drinking the kool-aid or is being disenguius (read in on the scam). It wasn't even ten years ago the Jupiter class devices came out, showcasing a market halfway between a PDA and a laptop, costing somewhere inbetween the two. These are still so popular Geeks.com is able sell refurbished Jordanas from nearly a decade ago for 150.00... The Jordanas in particular are worth noting, because the Netbooks which are all the rage today are very much a spiritual successor to these devices.

ASUS knew this market existed, as did Dell, HP (how could they NOT know??) and all the other big players in the computing industry. The truth of the matter is they knew this market existed and didn't care. They were much happier selling people a laptop for three thousand dollars and dismissing PDAs as junk. Unfortunately in the last few years OEMs and system retailers have found themselves stuck on a race to the bottom with no way to get off the track.

A combination of various factors had already pushed the desktop workstation to the $400.00 mark and then lower. When Walmart began selling gOS PCs for $199.00 in the store a line had been crossed and everyone knew it. Then along came the OLPC people talking about laptops at the same price point--and coming really close to achiveing it! Meanwhile just as the desktop workstation market had begun to hit the bottom so also had the laptop market began to follow in its footsteps with $700 becoming the common price for a laptop, then $400...

ASUS saw a chance to catapult themselves to the top four resellers AND a way to stop the race towards the bottom infecting the Laptop market. They took it, knowing full well the consequences of what would come. If the Eee was sucessful it would cripple the low end laptop market, fortunately for ASUS this was exactly the plan!

This is the way it works--first they create a inexpensive, low powered mobile device at or near the prices of your already existing notebook lines. Then you phase out all those low end notebooks and replace them with expensive gamer laptops, explaining the change is due to people choosing to buy their Netbooks over their laptops...

Then after a bit they can cancel the lowend desktop market in favor of a headless version of the subnotebook and push their high end gamer computer workstations, because "no one is interested in low end machines"

Finally they can slowly raise the price of their new netbooks and subnotebooks due to adding features until these are just under ten thousand using them....

At which point we'll be right back where we were before the boom bust. Funny how prices change, isn't it?

--bornagainpenguin

for me, at least.

I posting this from my EEE 900, with Xubuntu, and I couldn't be happier the dell, msi, ecs and others are too late, and anyway I prefer a 9" to a 10"