What’d You Do Ray?

Face it, now that the dam has broken with the OLPC, the EEE PC and now the prospect of Everex’s Cloudbook coming out in January at CES, Microsoft is really feeling the heat from Linux in this market. It also doesn’t help that people have reacted to Microsoft’s UMPC hardware offering with either loathing, disbelief ($1100 for THAT?!) or just plain ignored it.

Memory Lane

I’ve probably had most of the subnotebooks that have come out, and for someone who’s fingertips are about the size of 4+ Blackberry keyboard keys, I shouldn’t love this form factor, but somehow the convenience and just plain handiness of this genre has fascinated me for decades.

My first love in this genre was the HP 95LX, which debuted in the early 90’s and was really a small DOS-based super-sub-mini-notebook-thang. Ok, so it was really hard to type on, but it ran DOS, had great PDA functionality, and it was from HP for heaven’s sake. Another machine I’ve owned from HP was the Omnibook 600, I think it was, with the mouse attached and on a little arm, that was a fun machine!

I remember fondly my Gateway Handbook, which along with a serial cable and a copy of Procomm Plus helped me troubleshoot many a router back in the day. I had both the original one with the Chips & Technology 286-ish chip and then I upgraded to the Handbook 486. What an incredibly easy machine to carry around and to use, that form factor is sorely missed these days.

Remember the Toshiba Libretto line? I do, having owned 2 of them over the years, that was a very handy and easy to use format, but hell to type on. My daughter, upon finding the only one I still have, let out a cooing sound and spent the next 2 hours (amazing for a 4-year-old, short attention span) playing with it, carrying it around and banging on it’s chiclet keyboard. It’s only got 2G HD and 16MB of RAM but it still works.

I’m Getting There

That brings me to my point, and that is this: Finally the computer manufacturers, particularly for the lower-end market have seen the Linux light, and stopped paying the Microsoft Tax. I predict that this year we will see several other manufacturers release and or announce entrants in this sub $400, sub 2 lb market, and this will only be possible with the use of free or very low cost modern operating systems, ie: Linux.

I can’t wait for CES, I’ll buy the Everex Cloudbook immediately upon release, that and we should see something from Apple this year too. Small, light and very expensive if I don’t miss my guess.

Anyway, it should be a banner year for those of us who like subnotebooks and Linux, keep coming back, I’ll report on what I find and get as it happens.

Happy Holidays.

RossB

P.S. All of this will be fueled by the Cloud, get it, Cloudbook? Cloud = Google.

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