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The £99 laptop
Elonex takes on the Asus EEE PC with this tiny Linux machine
We've had all sorts of failed promises about cheap laptops for children over the last few months, so it's difficult to treat another one with any kind of respect. The OLPC (one laptop per child) project ended up being over-priced, and Intel later pulled out of the project. Meanwhile, Asus' EEE PC cost almost twice as much as it should have done when it was finally released. However, Elonex reckons that it's got the balance right with its new £99 ultra-portable ONE laptop.
Elonex's marketing manager, Sam Goult, took the opportunity to have a little dig at the OLPC project, saying that 'The ONE removes the cost barrier that has prevented the one-laptop-per-person, large-scale uptake of computers in the education system that has for so long been just a pipe-dream.'
Like the EEE PC, the ONE features a distribution of Linux, rather than Windows, which Elonex claims has 'massively reduced the cost and has been a major factor in making the ONE available sub £100.' No details of the specs have been announced yet and, when we probed for some extra info, Goult said that all would be kept under wraps until the laptop's big unveiling at The Education Show at the end of this month.
However, we do know that the ONE will feature integrated WiFi, and that it will also come with a word processor, spreadsheet, graphics package, email client and Web browser. Elonex says that it's also made a request to the government to make the laptop exempt from VAT, so that it really does cost £99, and that the incredibly low cost will also be achieved via corporate sponsors.
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oh gawd....we've spawned a world of EEEPC fanboys. damn you all suck so hard. quite frankly, the eeepc is designed to be a portable internet, e-mail, word, excel device right? well isn't that what the olpc does for half the price? however, not gonna doubt it looks like my backside.
Comment by sotu1 at 2:10pm 15th May 2008
This is the biggest load of junk i have ever seen. I have an EEPC, and i think it's great, they are over priced but still good. The good thing is though, they will be dropping in price over the next six months before they launch newer models, (wich will be overpriced), so if you want one, buy one when the next model comes out. I have found plenty of useful things to do with the EEPC laptop. It depends person to person and lifestyle to lifestyle. The good thing is i still have my ASUS LAMBO, and custom gaming rig. (Thank goodness for that) I recently went on holiday and found the EEPC great for traveling and getting touch online aswell as basic office tasks etc. I have even found the games addictive but only when i have my gaming rig or have nothing else to do. :)
Comment by CR7PTON at 9:59am 22nd February 2008
Has it got a solid state drive at that price? I doubt it. Anyone can throw together an ugly brick with a regular hard drive in for next to nothing. Looking at the pic it looks top heavy and unless it's an artist's impression looks as though it has a rubber keyboard like the old ZX81. Yuck. Nothing wrong with Linux. I bought my Eee PC expecting to put XP on it but after a short while playing with it I've found it really doesn't need changing. The Eee is a perfect little travelling laptop. I can write create and edit .doc and .xls files on it, access my email, play music/movies and browse the internet right out of the box. On top of all that it's silent running (no whirring hard drive). Sure it's no games PC but at this price you don't expect that (and you can still play Sam&Max, Monkey island etc using ScummVM which is a great laugh). On top of all that it weights next to nothing and for me the mosty important part is that the charger is no bigger than a mobile phone charger rather than those laptop chargers which tend to be as big and as heavy as the laptops themselves! Easy to throw it all in a carry-on bag. No doubt some of the other badly written/typed responses slagging it off expect a £200 machine to perform at the same level as a £2000 Alienware laptop which makes me think that the humble Eee is a heck of a lot better at processing information than they are!
Comment by chopper at 9:46am 22nd February 2008
damn computers are so locked these days.. now back to the old days where any monitor, keyboard, connectivity, and a hard disk in a tiny ff with low power consump. when youre number crunching, stats, and monitoring all without heavy maths -text goes a heck of a long way from GUIs - i have a 20" and i still script with 3 text windows open showing ASCII and my c2d CPU is taking around 60% load. this can be a glorified print server and bandwidth allocator for one.
Comment by thegreat0mi at 8:45am 22nd February 2008
this is just a typewriter pretending to be a laptop that if your luck you might be able to get internet pages to open on. Its just a simple word prosseser the type of witch bother and other have been making forever. The one good thing i can see about this is that it could be very good for schools as its so cheap and would do just the basics.
Comment by simoneisgod at 2:51pm 19th February 2008
this is just another attempt at pretending the computer market can be cheap... but it aint happenin after all its just rubbish tech what no one uses eg: linux (well at least no user with sence)
Comment by smiler_16 at 2:09pm 19th February 2008
get what you pay for. You cant expect a £99 laptop to be good can you?
Comment by rjkoneill at 1:53pm 19th February 2008
I'd rather buy a new monitor for my other computer
Comment by mrjimmyos at 12:47pm 19th February 2008
I agree, its fugly, its linux, and likely not compatible with other software, this aint a PC anyway, its a shoebox =) Its cheap, but i bet it doesnt have the same software that most families and the world use today, i.e. microsoft office ?! lol
Comment by Lightning_Pete at 12:01pm 19th February 2008
Got to say that finlay666uk is right. That doesnt look as good as the Asus one :(
Comment by ThunderBob at 8:09am 19th February 2008
That is fugly compared to my EEE PC
Comment by finlay666uk at 10:49pm 18th February 2008
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