"World's Cheapest Laptop" Available in Bulk Only 357
BobB writes to tell us that what one company is calling the "world's cheapest laptop" is now available at the price of $130. Unfortunately if you want to buy one you will also need to convince 99 of your closest friends to go in on an order with you since you cannot buy in less than units of 100. We have covered several "cheap laptops" in the past and many have turned out to be fraudulent, so especially with a large up-front cost, buyer beware. "The Impulse NPX-9000 laptop has a 7-inch screen and comes with the Linux OS. It has a 400MHz processor, 128M bytes of RAM, 1G byte of flash storage and an optional wireless networking dongle. It includes office productivity software, a Web browser and multimedia software."
Re:So group buy... (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.pledgebank.com/
Re:Looks pretty poor (Score:5, Informative)
Be amazed!!! There's a picture of the ports on the pruchase site (linked to from the artcle) and the specs and yes, one of the ports is external VGA [alibaba.com].
Re:Wow - low specs... (Score:5, Informative)
The website [impulseglobal.com] for Carapelli Ltd. (the supplier) is blank, the street address is a P.O. Box, although they list phone (886-2-25969225) and fax numbers (886-2-25941330) which may be active.
Here's a cheaper one... (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.alibaba.com/product-gs/206720976/7_mini_laptop.html [alibaba.com]
$90-$180 FOB Shanghai, QTY 500. Runs Linux or Windows CE.
Looks like they have variants of this from 7" to 12.1", which is why the range of prices.
Re:No wonder it's cheap (Score:3, Informative)
Cattledung. I've seen KDE running smoothly on a desktop with specs worse than that, perfectly usable for web browsing, e-mail, programming and text editing - which is exactly what its user, a Comp Sci student, needed on a daily basis.
These have been around for a while (Score:5, Informative)
Actually you can buy the same ones from Bestlink [bestlinkeshop.com]. They give bulk discounts too, but you don't have to buy in bulk from them.
The manufacturer of these notebooks keeps slapping on different labels, but they're all pretty much the same, except for some minor aesthetic and firmware differences.
I've compared one of them (from yet another reseller, with yet another unknown brand slapped on the back) to my EeePC 701 and here's what I found:
Pros:
- Cheaper then the Eee
- Smaller and lighter, even when compared with the 701
- Screen is very bright, even with the Eee at its brightest, the el cheapo is still brighter, see picture [imageshack.us])
Cons:
- No onboard wlan although it comes with a usb wlan device
- 400MHz mipsel as opposed to a 600 or 900MHz IA32 CPU in the Eee's
- No frozen bubble (???)
Re:I don't have 99 friends (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Will it run Flash? (Score:3, Informative)
They did. At least, some time ago they did just that. You can even see an icon for it if you look closely at the picture in TFA.
One catch though, it's only version 6 (and AFAICT, standalone-only).
Re:No wonder it's cheap (Score:4, Informative)
Hell, modern PDAs approach the specs of this thing.
Yep heres two.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N800 [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N810 [wikipedia.org]
Granted it is an ARM CPU but its still the same clock speed. You can pick up the N800's for 190-210 in some places and I'm sure >200 on eBay.
Re:What's the point? (Score:3, Informative)
All that's missing is a few ten of thousands of dollars to pay some programmers to write the software.
Luckily for us, someone's already done it. It's a neat concept called Open Source.
The US government paid for EMC [linuxcnc.org], a linux-based CNC controller system.
Using OWFS [owfs.org] you can make user-based file systems and run multisensor digital temperature and voltage detection systems to control kilns. (I've done this.)
There are a plethora of linux-based replacement PLC controller projects running out there.
Re:So group buy... (Score:3, Informative)
Non x86 Flash (Score:3, Informative)
It does exist. The Nokia tablets (n800/810) run Flash.
If you give Adobe enough money, they'll port Flash to your device's arch. Doesn't mean you'll be able to download and run it on a random box you're running Linux on for fun though.
Re:No wonder it's cheap (Score:1, Informative)
128mb is more than enough to run heaps of stuff. Things like DSL will run in ram with that much, and it comes with firefox standard.
Hell I ran Arch linux on a 500mhz celeron with 64mb and ran firefox. OpenOffice worked too, but it took ages to load, but once up and running it was useable.
Let me introduce you... (Score:3, Informative)
To DSL [damnsmalllinux.org].
50MB .iso for installation or to run as a live CD. It fits on a business card form factor CD. That's not just the OS. It's the OS, the Window Environment, all of the applications [damnsmalllinux.org] - to include multiple browsers (yes firefox!), chat, VOIP, spreadsheet, email client. A fully functional network OS with Server or Client profiles with advanced package management to add your favorite debian applications. Last major release July 2008.
Runs on (gasp) A 80486 with 16MB of RAM. Do you remember when that was an enterprise server costing $10,000+? Some of us do. Runs well on a P50 with 48MB or better. That is to say the software is modular and well integrated. The OS doesn't consume more resources than is required. Getting nostalgia yet? It makes a great base for virtual machines.
That's what I consider the low end of usable. And you? How many gigglehurts does it take to recalc your checkbook spreadsheet?
Do you know how they get all of that into such small requirements? They care. That's all. They just care. Is it that hard to care?
I have one in front of me. (Score:3, Informative)
Well the same thing as a prototype for a different branding. It is not a MIPS chip. It is an Xburst which is a Chinese clone of the MIPS instruction set. It does not have a floating point unit and there is a recompiled toolchain that does not use the FPU, and this has been used to compile Linux for the MIPSel (little endian) architecture. Flash support is weird. There is no plugin for the browser, but there is a standalone application that can play a downloaded .swf file. The operating system is quite locked down and seems to be some kind of single-user linux. If anyone has any suggestions on how to reflash the thing with something sensible (like a minimal command line Debian/MIPS) then I would be most interested to hear them. Here is some info on the CPU [ingenic.cn].
system type : JzRISC
processor : 0
cpu model : V4.15
BogoMIPS : 335.05
wait instruction : yes
microsecond timers : yes
tlb_entries : 32
extra interrupt vector : yes
hardware watchpoint : yes
VCED exceptions : not available
VCEI exceptions : not available