Cheap Ultraportable : Welcome to the Future

Traditionally in the world of laptop has always followed the law according to which – broadly speaking – a larger size, lower price. A marketing manager of Intel who visited the offices of PC actual to present the company’s products always carried his notebook, but at that time began to appear 17-inch models called ‘trailing’ instead of  ‘portable’ (nice joke with his name in English) and the fact is he was right. The laptops should be defined by his ability to be transported and used anywhere, but some models are a torture to those who have to carry with them day and night.

Precisely this factor has made long ultralight laptops  ‘ultra’ are the elite of this market. These marvels of design have an associated problem, namely that the miniaturization and compressing of space forces the manufacturer to choose certain options that increase the price considerably, so users who want a laptop in the range of 12-13 o’clock ‘ 3 inches and weights about one pound have to pay a fortune to enjoy these gadgets.

Or at least so far. The occurrence of at least three machines has changed this picture. The first was the XO, the ‘$ 100 laptop’ from the OLPC project, which is now on sale in the U.S. – although Negroponte not convinced the program “Give One, Get One ‘- by $ 399 and are an interesting alternative for educational environments. Second scene is entering the aggressive proposal by Intel and its Classmate, which follow the same concept and competing objectives but with a more closed and more product owner. At Ars Technica have already had two hands, and indeed in the image can see the look of both comparatively.

classmate olpc compare
OLPC compare

This is a ‘subnotebook’ which is the size of a novel and ridiculous weight that allows access to all computing capabilities that one uses in day to day and I thought was a true wonder. The keyboard is puny, yes, but in the few minutes I was messing around I realized that everything is a matter of getting used to, and if we add to that the fact that a pileup of as hackable – go with Xandros, but theoretically one can set up Mac OS X on it – the ASUS Eee PC has become one of my next goals.

Above all, taking into account its price: for $ 399 have a machine that gives you virtually everything that provides a regular notebook, but in a size and a much more advantageous. Clearly, this wonder will be a great triumph for ASUS, and you can go and preparing for similar proposals from Dell, HP, Toshiba and even Sony, which surely will not miss the opportunity to break into a new market segment: the low-cost subnotebooks.