next »

[Wayan Vota]

Switched On: Following in the Eee's wide footprints
Posted Dec 19th 2007 10:10PM
by Ross Rubin

In a year in which the OLPC foundation turned attention on its child-optimized OLPC stateside and Palm's backbone curved as it contracted Foleosis, an unlikely ultraportable rose to capture enthusiast praise.

Arriving late and at twice its original touted price of $199, the Asus Eee has succeeded in the muscle-driven PC market with modest screen size, processor, RAM and storage specifications and solid (but not outstanding) battery life. Its name and design philosophy take unabashed cues from Nintendo's Wii. And like its inspiration, it's been a budget-conscious blockbuster.

Reuters reports that Asus is now shipping 20,000 of the 2 lb. mobile computing quasi-appliances every month. The Tawianese manufacturer has been so encouraged that it has raised its global forecast to five million Eees by the end of 2008 as it aims at becoming the fifth largest notebook PC company by 2010. Those are the kind of numbers that could make the top four take notice, setting off a frenzy of melodramatic pound-shedding to rival The Biggest Loser.

http://www.engadget.com/2007/12/19/switched-on-following-in-the-eees-wide-footprints/

[Directive0]

In my view the announcement of the OLPC, no matter how criticized by its detractors, was a catalyst for this branch of consumer electronics.  There has been an ill defined "Ultra mobile" market for quite some time, but they always seemed to be very small computers with lots of bloat and more power then I required of something that small, and usually prohibitively expensive.  The OLPC, and the EEE PC in particular has a very singular purpose that I think attracts a lot of people, not to mention the price.  I already have a laptop, I didn't want a PDA, so I decided to get something inbetween.

Once the EEE pc comes in a wider screen I will probably cave and get one, but it depends what we hear from other manufacturers.

[kentsin]

EEE got many things right: balance of cpu power and weight. Useful set of software. They were well balanced then OLPC.