Posts by Cathal Gantly

How much?

I'm writing this on a Fujitsu Siemens Amilo Li2727, that cost £249 about two months ago. It's fully featured, and other than it's running Windows Vista, I don't think I've ever bought any IT equipment in 22 years that has been such good value, or delivered as much bang-per-buck for the money. It's even less expensive than the last two PDAs I bought.

The point being, that while all these sub-notebooks are rather good... they are a bit expensive. I know they have fallen from thousands to hundreds, but the Acer Aspire One... that's the price point that they need to hit. The success of the eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee PC was its price.

When will El Reg test the Acer? I've only read good things about it elsewhere.

Surely one of the big points here is price?

Is it just me or was the big selling point with the e series is a low entry price point? It certainly made me sit up and take notice.

I was slowly collect wedge to whack on an Acer Aspire One, until my main PC went tits-up. Clearly a hardware fault somewhere, and rather than endlessly change components I looked at buying a replacement. Then I noticed ASDA had an offer on... a fully featured laptop for £249!

I bought one... a Fujitsu Siemens Amilo Li2727. 15.4" glossy display, DVD writer, 120Gb HDD, wireless, 4xUSB. Downsides are only 1Gb of RAM and the real weakspot... Vista Home Basic. But putting everything into perspective, it's faultless for £249. It is a throw away price almost.

Yes, the price of these sub-notebooks is impressive when you consider the premium recently charged for such kit, but now we have comfortably entered the age of the seriously cheap laptop, unless the ultimate in portability is what you are after, price and feature creep will undo the early success this market sector has enjoyed. I bet the difference in size between these and typical notebook won't be a deal breaker for a lot of people.

P.S., I'm sure a read a review of the Acer Aspire One somewhere and they loved it. At £199 that's got everything going for it! Look at the price difference between models not in pounds, but in percent!

Pay & Go

iPhone will be available on P&G... it's on the o2 website.

As an o2 P&G user, this is good news for me. The handset prices are very competitive for P&G customers, who typically have to forget about having the latest and greatest handsets or else pay huge sums of cash to get them... if they are available. I fancied an iPhone Mk.1, but not on the original terms. This will give me the phone I want without paying fortunes to get it.

Why are they doing this? Well, there will be quite a few older iPhones being upgraded, and this gives them a new lease of life. Secondly, the gold rush is over. Most people who were prepared to pay full whack for an iPhone AND sign up to an expensive contract have done so. Think of the teenage market for this. Sign your kid up to a premium contract and pay £269 for a phone? Eh, no! But for £99 and a P&G sim, happy parents and happy kids. Beats an iPod touch!

Roll on July 11th...

Glad the war is over...

Even though I've got neither high def. format media. Also, it's not even showing on my purchasing radar, as for maximum value I'd need a 1080p telly to go with the player... and that would be a PS3.

Sony launched the PS2 with a DVD player capability and this gave consumers "another reason" to get the console. Back then, DVD was starting to gain momentum, and that gesture worked well for DVD and the PS2. So no surprise that Sony stuck a Blue-Ray drive in the PS3...

And what is absoloutly unbelievable, is that Microsoft , first to market with the 360 over Sony, didn't learn from this and put an HD drive in. Or, learn how the XBox couldn't play DVD's out of the box either...

I'm not overly concerned who's won the war, but I am glad it is over.

iPod Touch... progress

I've had my 3g iPod since it was launched back in April '03. I've still not filled the 30GB capacity. Love the iPod touch, and 32GB is now usable for me. The cost is less than I paid for my iPod five years ago, yet it's slimmer, uses SSD instead of HDD and has a proper colour screen. I think you could consider that progress.