by Ratt » Fri Nov 16, 2007 4:49 am
You can't quite put it into your coat pocket, though, not comfortably. Not like e.g. the Nokia 770 or N800 internet tablets. It's still a tad too big and heavy for that, which is inevitable with a keyboard that is still typable (anything smaller is a "thumb-board").
Nevertheless, the form factor could herald a revolution, a "game-changer" as some reviewers put it.
The lack of computing power is beside the point: it should be obvious that 99% of people buying laptops today never get to use all that dual-core power anyway. Oh sure, with more power their apps will boot faster, but without that extra power they'd still be opening them and using them even if it took 5 seconds longer. They'll still want to surf and email and do office with a real keyboard, and if they can do it at $400 or less, on a gadget that looks good and which they can take everywhere (ladies putting it into their handbags?), they'll gladly go for it.
They don't need more than a few gigs of storage, either. Not necessary for most basic tasks, and besides people have gazillions of free or cheap USB flash sticks lying around begging to be used for something like plugging them into an Asus Eee. I have at least a dozen sticks with 512MB or less lying around: they're too small to be useful on my PC or laptop, but I could still plug them into the EEE's four USB ports.
I've read some of the testing, BTW, and most compressed movies (DivX, etc.) play just fine. That's pretty amazing. I have to convert most videos to lower-resolution in order to play them on my 770.
Granted, a screen with higher resolution than 800x480 would be great for surfing all those wide-built websites (you don't need more screen estate for text processing, though, for that it is just fine) but that would up the price with at least 100 bucks IMO. A much better solution would be to implement good automatic zooming software inside the browser (not unlike what the iPhone has, for example).
"Remember, kids, only rich people can sidestep the law. When you download our music without permission, you undermine the very fabric of society, but when we move our money to offshore tax shelters, that's simply 'fiscal responsibility'."
--MrFredPFL
