Is laptop design set in stone?

Wednesday, June 4th, 2008

You’ve probably seen the advert: a town wrapped in white paper, a “blank canvas” on which we can start afresh, create from scratch. The perfectly reasonable question, “why do we keep following the same old design rules?”. The answer (probably), “because your bendy green parking meter takes up twice the pavement space of existng, perfectly functional parking meters”.

Then after all that build up – what will Ford’s totally original, designed from a blank canvas, revolutionary car look like, oh the suspense! – they bring out the Kuga. And it looks like… a car. Oh.

It got me thinking, we all know what a laptop looks like, but is the current design the definitive one? With the arrival of the Eee we saw a whole new category of laptop, but the design was still pretty much as expected. Keyboard, mouse buttons, lid: check. There must be at least one other design that makes enough sense to make it to mass market.

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When will Sony join the “race to the bottom”?

Thursday, May 29th, 2008

“If [the Eee PC from] Asus starts to do well, we are all in trouble. That’s just a race to the bottom.”

Those were the words of Sony’s senior vice president Mike Arbary, as reported in our news story back in February.

Well I’ve got some bad news for you, Mike. The race to the bottom is well and truly on, and you’ve not even reached the starting line yet.

Dell has today become the latest company to unveil an Eee PC rival, with its Mini-Inspiron (good to see Dell hasn’t lost its touch with imaginative product names).

That bears more than an uncanny resemblance to HP’s Mini Note, which failed to knock the Eee of its pedestal according to our laptops editor, but will still increase interest in this ultra-low budget market.

So that’s HP and Dell on board,  and Acer’s heavily rumoured to be biding its time with an Eee rival of its own. How much longer can Sony afford to hold out? I’ll give it until Christmas.

To Eee or Not to Eee?

Thursday, May 15th, 2008

I’m in something of a quandary. After seeing just how much work I can get done on the train – there’s an awful lot of time to be had in between businessman having fights with their portable bicycles and then hammering away on their Blackberries – I’ve decided to buy some sort of ultraportable laptop.

My motivation is that while I’d like to work on the train, getting anything done at the moment requires more effort than I’d like. Which, ideally, is no effort at all. At the moment, hammering out a review on the journey home involves lugging a (relatively) heavy laptop in an extra bag, with the respective power cables in case I decide to use it when I get home, too. I’d like to condense this down somewhat, and some sort of smaller, lighter laptop stands out, as I’d be able to slip it into my backpack with everything else.

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Eee and me – “the talk”

Friday, April 25th, 2008

I think it’s fair to say that in the PC Pro offices I’m known for two things: making cups of tea and an unfathomable love for the Eee PC. And when I say unfathomable I mean it. We’re like that couple in the corner of the tube every morning - you know, the overly affectionate ones who never come up for air and nobody looks directly at.

It was a bit of a whirlwind romance to be fair, love at first sight and why shouldn’t it have been? The Eee is thin, pretty and most importantly cheap – pretty much my ideal date. Only thing is, success has turned its head. Suddenly, with the release of the Eee PC 900, it’s not so cheap anymore and if it carries on gorging on additional tech, it’s not going to be so thin either.

All in all, I think somebody needs to sit down with Asus and explain that its baby doesn’t need a bigger screen. It doesn’t need a bigger chasis, it doesn’t need more memory or a higher price tag. There are plenty of other laptops around for that, and yet the uncomfortable feeling persists that while everyone else gets giddy about tiny, cheap laptops, Asus, almost perversely, intends on taking the Eee the other way.

And when it does, expect a very messy break up.