Some time ago, $1500 was a good price for laptops (I don’t speak here about rugged laptops since there is an other price for them due to special manufacturing conditions). $1000 was considered a bargain, but lately, the market is asking for a lot of cheap laptops, net being happy with these prices anymore. People interested in laptops ask now to spend less and less for technology. I wonder if this is an effect of prices going up generally speaking, so people look for spending less on particular items, or the technology reached a point where common usage of computers require less power, thus less money?
A few years ago, in order to run particular applications, you needed good computer power, but nowadays, technology reached a point where most applications could run very well on common computers, so people may not be that eager to spend big money for technology anymore. Thus this need for cheap laptops? Who know?
Or maybe the reason is the continuous fight for market share? Maybe price became one of the most important arguments when trying to differentiate notebooks on the market, since technology is almost the same for common usage.
Think of last years’s Assus laptop that had was only $499, well, that was a cheap but basic laptop, isn’t it? Now Asus does it again coming with the $699 ASUS Eee PC 1000H. Another one that is going to shake the market, I think.
I think that soon, a lot of notebooks manufacturers will join the race and will try to provide cheaper and cheaper notebooks with each passing day!
a few days ago I have posted about the fact that 12,000 laptops are stolen every week in US airports. These last days I have seen this news posted by every possible blog and article in this niche. Really, I think that everybody was amazed by the high number of stolen laptops, I can not open Google News and look for laptops anymore cause this news appears over and over again under various forms.
This must have been a hit of some sort, the news I mean…
UK workers take their laptops with them while in holiday! At least that is what vnunet.com says. Well, what’s the big news, after all? I plan to go to a holiday in a couple of weeks and I also plan to take my laptop with me, so no news here! The fact is that we can not live without our internet connection and computer, no matter where we are and what we do, right?
What I don’t agree with is that over 65% will contact the office while in holiday, well, not me, from my point of view, I go for good! However, I want to stay in touch with my websites while there and with my personal email. For the rest, nope! If you have some kind of smart device, one of those Nokia E Series phones, use them for something else, not to contact your office while in holiday, OK?
The only thing that we should consider there is that report of the 12.000 laptops being stolen every week, because, I guess nobody wants to missplace the computer somewhere while in holiday. It would ruin your holiday AND your days at the office!
Seems that the game is on and the race is tough! Period! A few months ago, NEC joined the race and now ASUS comes in too! It must be good!
The laptop I speak about is the new ASUS B51E, which is MIL 810F approved which surely tells a lot about it. let’s see:
The laptop can drop up to 75cm and still lives on! Good one!
The drainage holes on the keyboard prevent up to 120cc of liquid from entering the internal components.
The baby has a Magnesium-alloy chassis with rubber bumpers.Tough guy!
High-strength protective film protects LCD from scratches so it can be operated outside, in difficult environment without any issue.
Sponge protection system keeps harddrive from losing data due to vibration and drops. If you also add this one to the first one with dropping it from 75 cmm, we have a good solution here, I would say!
What the laptop has inside? Well, a Core 2 Duo chip, integrated Intel GMA X3100 graphics processor, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth radios as well as an optional integrated Webcam, so kind of a regular laptop, isn’t it?
I don’t know anything about the price at this moment so let’s wait and see!
I was reading this morning how computer Italian market is driven by laptops, how sales for laptops grow year by year. Actually, if you look to the 35% growth rate for laptops sales in Italy, then you must agree that it is something to consider…The whole computer market in Italy seems to be doing pretty well, but nothing compares to how laptops are sold there!
Then, to my surprise, I’ve seen an other article on an other site about how sales for laptops in Germany boom! Seems these guys give a free laptop for every purchased one, or they sell really cheap laptops or I can not explain it,really!
An improvement in the German economy coupled with the rising strength of the Euro has contributed to a 44 per cent year-on-year increase in sales of mobile computers.
Ooo, this is good! This is even better than in Italy! But wait, how are other European countries doing? Let’s see!
In UK, seems that there is a 40% growth in laptop sales. Over 60% of the 3.1 million units shipped in the UK last quarter were notebooks while France, Spain and Sweden show gains of between 30 and 40%.
I think this is also the situation in Romania, even if I can not give you numbers. As a short conclusion, we purchased 3 new computers for our office, all of them were laptops and not desktops.
Israeli researchers Marianna Khorzov and David Andelman from the School of Physics and Astronomy at Tel Aviv University, and Rafi Shikler, from the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Ben Gurion University say that considering current research, in a few years we may have flexible laptops and 1 cm thick TV screens. Well, it would be very interesting to see this.
For this, scientists say that the conventional materials will be replaced and soon we could rely on plastic based transistors and organic light sources. If it sounds strange to you to have plastic based transistors, they also say that these components are easier and cheaper to make. Imagine that!
This was actually a report published in Physics World. Researchers stated that current display technologies are rigid, consume more energy that organic based technology and it may be soon replaced by organic based components, which could bring high changes including in the cost price considering the fact they are cheaper.
“We expect that, for many applications, these materials will gradually replace silicon and metals, and may even make possible entirely new technologies in the field of bionics,” the researchers said.
I personally wait to see how those flexible laptops will look like. If you think about, people try to build rugged laptops, to be as strong as possible, to not be easily damaged and on the other hand people try to make them flexible… O2 deals
I don’t know what’s wrong with me these last days, something makes me publish news from this very interesting part of the world where people test laptops by stepping on them…
Now, lawmakers in Bhutan decided to ban laptops because they fear of people spending time on looking at pictures and playing games! Man, this is whicked!
“The members can be distracted playing games and viewing pictures,” said Nima Tshering, speaker of the assembly.
Yeah, right! My thoughts exactly! Do you guys, have cars? You know, it may be dangerous because people may get run over by one of those cars one of these days, here it happens and we didn’t ban them!
But as Reuters says, these people seem to have banned also smoking (I kind of agree here), electronic gadgets!!! and eating? I can’t give you much info on this lat one, but this thing with laptops being banned suddenly started to not be that important anymore compared to the eating(?) thing!
I must be going out of my mind, really! I agree that rugged laptops have to be strong and withstand all kind of tests, but this Indian company overdid it! Before delivering laptops to students, they decided to test them for how rugged they really are, so they put the laptops on a hard floor and asked people weighting over 80 kilos to walk over them just to test them…
After the “test” is finished, the computers are booted and if everything works fine, then the computer manufacturer is allowed to participate in the price bid! How mad is that?
By the way, the company is a government company that delivers IT service in the Tamil Nadu region.
In the video below, a guy weighting 92 kilograms (or 202.8 pounds) and another weighing 85 kilograms walked over laptop computers from Acer and Dell.
I understand that they want to be sure that these laptops are rugged enough to work in those conditions that they require, but I think there is no reason for which they should test the computers these way. Man, we speak about Dell laptops and about Acer, right? I love Dell laptops, they have a beautiful design and the last thing I would do is to walk all over them just to test them…
“We subject any laptop we purchase, even for our internal use, to the same fire-walk test,” said C. Umashankar, managing director of Elcot. “You do have vendors delivering plastics that are very poor quality.”
Interesting that we speak here about 100,000 cheap laptops, because the government offers a big offer, asking a low price instead. We speak here about cheap laptops, at about $490.
Now, this is good, indeed. Dell says that they joined the already long list of computer makers that will offer this service to their customers. Data show that approx. 12.000 laptops are lost in US airports during one week time. If we do the math, 12000 per week means 48000 per month, means 576000 laptops stolen or lost over one year. It’s a lot, in my opinion…
This service that Dell is going to offer will delete sensitive files on the hard disk of the stolen laptop the first time it will connect to the internet. The service will be provided by Absolute Software Corp. and it will cost less that $100 for 3 years of service.
The list of companies that joined forces with Absolute Software Corp. contains Hewlett-Packard Co., Lenovo, Panasonic, Fujitsu Ltd. and Toshiba Corp. so Dell should get into the game fast to not lose in front of their competition.
Yesterday one of our articles (he one about the latest GETAC Rugged PDA) got stumbled, this sent a nice traffic to this website, traffic that I hope will come back again. These days it is easier to get to public attention with social media sites. I just ask myself how good is this traffic since our readers are actually tech people, usually, not internet surfers that spend a lot of time on such social sites.
No matter, in the end is traffic that came our way! I salute it!
UK workers take their laptops with them while in holiday! At least that is what 
I was reading this morning how computer 
I don’t know what’s wrong with me these last days, something makes me publish news from this very interesting part of the world where people 
Now, this is good, indeed. Dell says that they joined the already long list of computer makers that will offer this service to their customers. Data show that approx. 12.000 laptops are lost in US airports during one week time. If we do the math, 12000 per week means 48000 per month, means 576000 laptops stolen or lost over one year. It’s a lot, in my opinion…