Sometime ago Loren Heiny wrote a very good comment about UMPC prices and he was asking on it why the UMPC price was that high when it could be a lot lower. Well, today I'm going to show you a video of a Asus Eee PC, a subnotebook which price is $399. This subnotebook does not classify as UMPC because it does not have a touch screen but in this video JKK upgraded this device with a touch screen for just 60 dollars! So, why we do not see UMPCs for less than $600 dollars?
Who is holding the price up?
When you add in the touch screen, a bigger HD, that isn't SSD, Bluetooth, and Windows, you start to see increased costs bringing it up to almost $800. You figure, $60 for the touch screen, another $100 for a 40GB HD, another $150 for a windows license, maybe $20 for integrated bluetooth, don't forget the higher quality plastics and other components such as fans...I don't know. Plenty of other costs that are associated with it.
ReplyDeleteHowever I do agree with you. If they can make a machine like that cost so little, they SHOULD be able to get UMPC's down by almost 50% in cost.
So, it's not hardware what's keeping the price up! It's the same Microsoft with a very expensive OS.
ReplyDeleteEssentially yes...the sad part is, with UMPC's that run Vista, you get slower performance on a machine that wasn't meant for Vista. Even the A110 processors from Intel cannot deal well with Vista, no matter how much you throttle back the visual effects. Even TabletXP has its drawbacks. Dialog boxes don't show well on a 7" screen, and viewing web pages on anything less than a 1024 is just not wise. I owned a Samsung Q1. It was a great device, however I sold it as the OS is not quite there yet.
ReplyDeleteWhen you use the touchpack settings with the Q1; sure it allows for better finger driven input however you lose valuable screen space.
Until you see a better input method, either in the form of Finger and Pen driven input, and a better OS to drive those functions UMPC's are still going to take moe time to catch on.
They have alot of potentional. Especially with students, however costs, and the things I mentioned above are going to keep that from happening. So come on MS design an OS that isn't Vista for the UMPC, and make it cheap!
Maybe time to convert to linux? or go for a MID?
...or it's time to tell Microsoft that they are part of the problem. A big part I would say. At least that's what I think. We need more post like this and the one mentioned on it.
ReplyDelete