Posted on 03/04/2009 8:57:15 AM PST by kingu
Wait until ASUS T91 arrives - a $500 net tablet. You buy a Book reader and get GPS, TV and Windows apps thrown in for free.
I found that one ages ago and sucked down every download they offered. Some good...some crap. All of them can be downloaded in Microsoft Reader or zip format (which can be read and reformatted by YBook Reader and made to look like a real book.
Thanks for posting that, I’m planning on getting my son a netbook when he graduates from the 8th grade in may.
Curious. Can you pull the battery and operate off of the adapter only? That’s how we run our laptops, here at the house, and the batteries stay good for much longer, too.
Oh heck you can build a better computer (RAM, storage, speed) than these things for cheaper than they are, especially if you avoid the big names and go to your local dude. Remember this microscopic size costs money.
Didn’t read any criticism at all.
My 26 cost $330. I was shocked actually by how cheap it was, I went in aiming for a 22 wide but the 26 wide was only $90 more and it’s got better inputs.
My grandparents had one of those little bitty TVs. By the time I got around to looking at it I was more impressed with it’s durability, thing had to be 20 years old (probably closer to 30) the first time I looked at it and it still worked... mostly.
I love my Dell Mini 9, running Ubuntu.
I got the Mini to take along on the mc, I’d trashed a few hard drives (and I work for a HD manufacturer) on the bike, so I opted for a SSDD, no moving parts.
I get email, FR, offload my camera and load maps into my GPS. What else is there?
3d finite element modeling ?
I have desktops and notebooks for that, and don’t do it on vacation
I haul a 15.4” Sony, dual core, 2G, 120.........on business trips. Which beats the 17” Dell notebook I used to drag around.
While there will be people who love netbooks, and for good reasons, even Apple said they aren’t going into that market any time soon because on average too many people are disappointed with netbooks after the initial glow fades. They won’t go there unless they can make one “right” so that more people stay happy with them for longer.
In the case of the Asus machines, they come with a recovery DVD. If you buy a Windows version, it’s got Windows XP on it, if you buy a Linux version, it’s got Xanderos on it. It will reformat and imprint the same image you had when you bought the machine, takes about 8 minutes from booting off the external to finishing the imprint on Linux, about twice as long with Windows (why it uses Windows to imprint the image, I don’t get, but that’s what it does.. Norton Ghost...)
I can’t imagine that other manufactures do that differently, but one has to be aware that SSD drives do have a failure rate. Because it re-maps the drive to spread use over the whole silicon drive, to balance use and to prolong it’s lifetime, normal recovery processes (such as recovering the MBR) won’t work on them, as where we /think/ the MBR is, could be anywhere on the physical chip rather than the expected address.
Just don’t lose that DVD, it’s highly important if things go south on you. :)
Yes, you can pull the battery and operate just on the adapter, it pulls down about 14watts in that configuration - which is slightly higher than the 11watts it pulls when the battery’s fully charged and plugged in. Don’t know why the difference, but that’s with Windows or with Eeebuntu, so it’s gotta be at the hardware level.
Apple apps do not have a small processor footprint, and while people have Hackintoshed EeePCs to run Apple’s OS, it is pretty durn slow even with the 1.6mhz processors. Perhaps with SnowLeopard there might be enough speed improvements to consider making a netbook, or the other way around, using something like the iTouch’s OS to make a netbook.
The thing is, for Apple, a $300 computer just doesn’t make much financial sense for them - they already have them, they’re called iPhones and come with an AT&T contract. Why make a netbook when you already have a small format computer? In many ways, the netbooks that are out there are replacing the PDAs we used to lug around.
I mean, a T-Mobile G1 or an iPhone does much of what someone who uses a netbook might want, why reinvent the wheel?
I personally use it for video watching and whatnot, pulling television off of my BeyondTV and MythTV rigs, so the larger screen makes a very big difference in enjoying television. Not the same on an itty bitty low res touch screen phone, and for me, the netbook replaced a five year old Axim x51v.
As things progress, and community supported OSes expand further, it wouldn’t surprise me if they really expand the abilities of these netbooks as time goes on. The speed of the linux OS has gotten faster each time someone comes up with a new release, and as I said earlier, Windows 7 gives a similar to XP baseline. I really think that netbooks are here to stay.
It depends on the apps, plus you need to have decent graphics to run Quartz (the UI). If you don't, OS X will downgrade to using the CPU, and the Atom can't handle that. But I've heard they do quite well on notebook 1.6 GHz Intel processors.
Perhaps with SnowLeopard there might be enough speed improvements to consider making a netbook
Snow Leopard will shrink the memory footprint of the OS and included apps, and tighten the OS a bit, but otherwise the main performance improvements will come from better leveraging of multi-core systems and GPUs. A netbook can't take much advantage of that.
The rest reminds me of the rumors I've been hearing. If Apple does it, they won't be trying to squeeze a full desktop/laptop OS into a netbook (remember when MS first tried to squeeze Windows into portable devices?), but will probably use a variation of the OS X that's running the iPhone/Touch. Basically, think of an iPhone/Touch with an 8-10" screen and an almost full-size virtual keyboard.
How do you use the DVD with no optical drive?
Kewl!...I have a bunch of Baen paperbacks in boxes in the basement...from the 70s, 80s, maybe early 90s...haven’t been reading SF for years...or much fiction...or non-fiction, just work related stuff and Intratubes timewasting stuff...
Thanks for that info.
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