Note: These are not regular laptops. Though they have most features of regular ones, but you may love to call them, mini-laptops.
At last, OLPC has done one thing good. It has generated a lot of "noise" about the unleashed market. Because of this Asus has started a Eee PC which had been under microlense of media whenever OLPC is covered. Obviously, as media shouts about Asus laptops, more of them sold in the market (currently it is hovering around 1 Million). This has made all the standard laptop manufacturers to take a worthy note of it. And now this is about to benefit the customers. Instead of pricing low-weight, less-size laptops as 3000 USD or above, for the first time many companies quote the prices below 1000 USD. Another interesting point here is that, these companies are looking for alternate operating systems such as Windows XP, Linux, etc. instead of throwing (the worst) Vista operating system to the customers headache.
According to Wired magazine review:
Definitely, price is one of the catchy point for urban-poor/students. However, if the manufacturers wish to target rural rich customers, then they must tweak the laptops to perform under "rugged" conditions (temperature, dust, water, etc) and possibly should include technologies like WiMax.
My favorite among these is MSI Wind notebooks. How about yours?
At last, OLPC has done one thing good. It has generated a lot of "noise" about the unleashed market. Because of this Asus has started a Eee PC which had been under microlense of media whenever OLPC is covered. Obviously, as media shouts about Asus laptops, more of them sold in the market (currently it is hovering around 1 Million). This has made all the standard laptop manufacturers to take a worthy note of it. And now this is about to benefit the customers. Instead of pricing low-weight, less-size laptops as 3000 USD or above, for the first time many companies quote the prices below 1000 USD. Another interesting point here is that, these companies are looking for alternate operating systems such as Windows XP, Linux, etc. instead of throwing (the worst) Vista operating system to the customers headache.
According to Wired magazine review:
Definitely, price is one of the catchy point for urban-poor/students. However, if the manufacturers wish to target rural rich customers, then they must tweak the laptops to perform under "rugged" conditions (temperature, dust, water, etc) and possibly should include technologies like WiMax.
My favorite among these is MSI Wind notebooks. How about yours?
2 comments:
Hi,
I wonder why is everyone concentrating on cheap laptops, do people really need laptops, cant they do away with PCs, I was wondering if there is any company in India which makes cheap computers available to village folks, because challenges there are more especially power and all.
@Goli,
There are two points. Firstly whether rural people need a PC or not. Assuming they need it, you can clearly see that laptops makes much sense for rural populations compared to a PC for the following straight reasons.
1. Battery backup is considerably high. For example, for one of the laptop I mentioned has 7 hour back-up.
2. Voltage differences it can sustain up to an extent.
3. You can get connected to world using a USB data connection.
4. Maintenance costs are relatively less.
5. In sparsely populated areas, you need mobile devices. So that you can utilize the devices to their full productive levels.
And coming to the first question, do they need a PC??
You must understand that most services such as bill-payments, ticketing, mobile recharge, matrimonials, jobs, various applications, videos, audios, watching TV, social networkings, etc are available for PC. This makes them attractive towards such a device.
Currently the adoption rate is much slow because services those I mentioned are not matured. When they are, you will see explosion.
Thanks,
Raja
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