Yeah, especially the cheaper part! It's like did they just discovered some underground mines that has a huge cache of pre-fabbed casing or cpu wafer? Or did they had an overnight meeting and decided to stop fleecing us like killing babies?
Maybe Intel are doing an M$ and are giving away the CPUs to Asus - in an attempt to undermine the OLPC? Note that Intel's own "low cost" effort isn't exactly low cost, but they cannot afford to sell it at lower than cost price without facing charges of dumping - they can sidestep that by making a deal with Asus. Am I sounding too much like a conspiracy theorist?
It is possible. They could do it to push for their Intel platform, like by subsidizing the per chip cost with marketing or business development funds. The wonders of accounting!
Anyway, I hope consumers don't hold out too long that the manufacturers loose interest in this new segments.
At less than $200 I shouldn't think they have much difficulty shifting units especially to Linux enthusiasts. But it's not going to be released until Autumn and I can't wait
Aye ... that's why the Kohjinsha is such a winner ... ... it is delivered. And although it still misses the $500 price and all day computing promise, I would say that it is one of the closes hit compared to other UMPC devices.
The one thing I hope manufacturers realise is that when they open up their platform, whether through open sourcing their whole OS, or at least provide a comprehensive SDK, then users and hobbists alike can develop apps and grow their platform. Think Palm & Psion.
I was reading the psion history article and I could not help but wonder how much of psion's demise was due to its bad pricing.
I believe their pricing was very reasonable considering what you got for the money. Remember it came with a full productivity suite builtin (Word, Sheet, Data etc) which eg on the Palms you had buy 3rd party apps for. The memory and screen was far bigger than any Palm of that vintage. As for the wince machines some may have had better hardware by the time Psion withdrew from the market, but they were and still are crippled by an inferior OS and inferior bundled apps. The bottom line is that for the other machines to begin approaching the productivity that you can get out of a stock Psion you would have to spend a fair bit of money on 3rd party apps - so IMO the Psions are very good value for money. Then there are the things that money can't buy - the excellent keyboard, the stability of the OS, the benefits of an OS specifically designed around the peculiarities of a small device.
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Guess you are right, I should be honest with myself. When the psion was out, I was still a broke student and the retailers and businesses here do not necessarily bring in good stuffs in those days. They only cared about short term matters like paying the bills and not planning long term strategies such as working on partnerships with OEMs, though I should confess that OEMs may not be interested with small frys as well ...
Anyway ... yes, Psions are quite useful productivity tools, matter of fact, as I mentioned in another thread, I've got the psion emulator installed so that I can use the Agenda program amongst others.
Let's see how this pan out. Hopefully, these companies would open source their contribution so that their implementation is not stuck in one device. Then again ... ...
