IT Support
The £149.99 laptop
Netbooks, Ultra-portable laptops, or just very-cheap laptops – call them what you will, but there’s a lot of excitement surrounding the tiny, £150 laptops on sale these days.
The story started with the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) initiative. This was a bold step to produce an affordable laptop to help the children of the developing worlds have access to a computer.
Since then, ASUS released the Eee PC – a small laptop with an 8.9” screen, and a price of £150. To keep costs low, the laptop came with a Linux operating system. And, to make it exciting, there’s lots of ‘educational’ content to inspire the kids and ensure every self-respecting parent bought one (instead of a ‘games console’).
Then Microsoft, seeing an opportunity, resurrected Windows XP and agreed to supply it to the Netbook market at a low price-point to rival the Linux operating system.
And now, there’s plenty of competition around from the big manufacturers – Acer have released the ‘One’, HP have a well-made Mini-Note, Dell are about to launch the Mini-9, Samsung, LG and Lenovo have their own offerings, and it’s rumoured that Apple are soon to announce their own netbook model.
Who’d have thought that in a world where (1) full-size laptops can be bought for £399; (2) the UMPC format has failed to take off (possibly because of the £700/£900 price?); and (3) the Smart Phone has as much computing power as many people need on the road; that a whole new category would open up? 
But, I guess the cheap price is hard to ignore. If you want to know more, we’ve got a few of these new Netbooks in our meeting room. Come in and have a play, and see for yourself what the possibilities are.
And, as people get used to paying £150 for a laptop, how long before the pressure is on for cheaper desktops too? ASUS are waiting in the wings already – they’ve got the Eee Top – a cheap desktop PC, with a full touch-screen. Couple this with people’s changing spending habits during the Credit-Crunch, and the pressure will really be on for ‘cheap’ computing. Watch this space..
back to October techbyte..