Years ago a single- or double-speed CD-ROM drive without burning capabilities would set you back several hundred dollars. And today? A twenty-dollar bill buys you a high-speed DVD burner. Even Blu-ray drives aren't all that expensive anymore. Are optical drives on their way out? With ubiquitous broadband, streaming media, cloud storage, and digital downloads taking over, that could very well be the case, and it's already happening in the mobile world.
Verizon today announced
Some people thought Asus was downright crazy when it said it was building a $200 netbook. That's not a whole lot more than an eBook reader, and it's certainly cheaper than most tablet PCs that are supposedly cannibalizing the netbook market. Well, Asus is proving the skeptics wrong with its $199 Eee PC X101, an ultrathin netbook that now has an official product page.
Someone needs to put a vending machine in the lounge where Acer's marketing and design teams hang out. Clearly these guys and gals are starving, or at least that's our hypothesis on how Acer came up with the Aspire One Happy 2 netbook line, "a series of stylish netbooks in four fun and flavorful colors" including "Banana Cream," "Blueberry Shake," "Papaya Milk," and "Strawberry Yogurt."
Google's Chrome OS is all about thriving in the cloud with as little emphasis as possible placed on the actual hardware needed to get there. Be that as it may, if you're planning on picking up a Samsung Series 5 Chromebook running the Chrome OS, you'll have to fork over $430 for the Wi-Fi only version, or $500 for the 3G model. That's entry-level notebook territory, but before you call shenanigans, let's have a peek at what it costs to build a Chromebook.
Someone over on Acer's marketing team woke up on the right side of the bed and remembered to take their happy-go-lucky pill this morning, which must have been washed down with the most delicious smoothie ever made. That's the only explanation we have for the over-to-top cheery press release that just landed in our laps, the one telling us about the Aspire One Happy netbook that comes in four fruity colors (Blueberry Shake, Papaya Milk, Strawberry Yogurt, and Banana Cream).
We’re not living so close to the cutting edge here at Maximum PC that we can’t see the utility of a no-frills, budget portable that’s capable of performing all the common day-to-day computing tasks. Whether it serves as a secondary machine for work on-the-go or as a primary PC for a school-age kid, we get it. It’s the same need that netbooks were meant to fulfill, if only they hadn’t fallen short of the mark. What netbooks taught us is that today’s common computing tasks—which include things like gaming and high-def video playback—require more power than an Atom processor and integrated graphics can muster.
The first Chromebooks from the likes of Acer and Samsung are scheduled to begin shipping on June 15. But a little known Australian company has beaten the two vendors to the Chome/Chromium OS laptop punch. Australia’s Kogan is already taking orders for a 12-inch Chromium OS laptop called Agora, which it expects to begin shipping on June 7. Hit the jump for more on the world’s first Chromium OS notebook.
Tech companies tend to get flashy at Computex. Want an example? Fractal froze a computer chassis in a giant block of ice using water from a Swedish river, then shipped the rig – still frozen – all the way to Taipei for the show, just because. Intel's not like that though. It's more of the strong, silent type, the kind of company that lets its numbers do the talking, rather than blocks of ice. Intel's numbers caused a stir at Computex when the company announced it had shipped more than 100 million Atom processors in the last three years.
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