Small laptops
In my recent trip to Taiwan I bought an Asus eee 701. This is the famous cheap, simple, and low powered laptop that is turning the industry upside down.
In my case its improving the way I work. Before having it, I used to carry my thinkpad everywhere with me. I really love this rock solid, super stable laptop, but has two problems. First, even being an ultraportable, it weights 1,4 kg which is too heavy if you are going to carry it always with you. The other problem is that I was using the x40 as my main laptop and I didn’t want to have the risk of losing it or (even worse) losing the data.
With the inexpensive laptop everything changes. It’s almost always with me in my bag because it’s a lot lighter and I use it wherever I have free time. Subways? No problem. As I don’t trust the laptop, I don’t carry sensible information there anymore (all my data is stored online anyway) so I’m less worried.
What kind of use does these small underpowered laptop have? I use mine mainly as a typewriter. I like to go to public areas like parks or crowded streets. Lots of ideas come to my mind while looking the people walking and running around me. These ideas are captured by my fingers and stored in the laptop.
It’s not perfect though. This laptop is cheap and unfortunately the keyboard is one of the places they Asus save money. The keyboard is bad if compared with Thinkpad’s family keyboards which personaly are the best laptop keyboards ever. It’s necessary to hit with energy each one of the keys to be sure that the keyboard is going to detect the letters correctly. Furthermore the keys are tiny, even for my small fingers. I frecuently hit keys I dont want.
That’s the price of convenience. Cheap underpowered laptop for online use and typewriting. Light. Almost disposable and without critical data stored.
Online use? Yes, another feature of the mini laptops is the webcam. These laptops are the perfect videoconferencing tool. The webcam and internal microphone allows you to have a pretty good video quality and decent audio quality without need of external microphones or headphones. And it’s light meaning you can easily move it around.
Three months ago was impossible to find small laptops in Korea but last week I went to Yongsan (Seoul electronic market, the biggest in Asia) and they had small laptops everywhere. Furthermore there have several options, including the new MSI wind which is by far a better deal than the Asus family, not only because the hardware (I don’t care about that anymore) but because the screen and the keyboard look a lot better.
Seoul Firefox 3 release party
Last week I attended the Firefox 3 release party in Seoul, in Daum Headquarters. Daum is the main search engine in Korea, way ahead in market penetration than Google and there were a lot of interesting people related to the Korean Internet world.
The host gave us stickers, food and drinks. Mitchell Baker, CEO of the Mozilla Foundation was here and we spoke about the important role Firefox has from now on, providing a safe and clean browser for the masses.
In the Q&A, I asked a question about the huge problem Firefox faces in Korea. Here the Firefox penetration is very low and there is a good reason: Lots of Korean websites make heavy use of proprietary extensions in the form of Active X controls that can’t be used on Firefox.
I asked Mitchell if the Mozilla foundation has any plans to address this issue and Michelle told us that Firefox will never execute Active X controls because of the huge security hole they create. What they are doing to fix the problem is going through the political way, educating the people who take decisions . I think is the correct way.
For example, Michelle was in Seoul this week because the next day she was going to attend a meeting with Korean ministers to request them to eliminate the need of the Active X controls in the government websites.
It was a fantastic technological party and hope to soon enjoy firefox 3.1 release party too!
UPDATE: I’ve just added a group picture I founded on flickr
Computex 2008, small laptops are the future
I visited Taiwan last week and I sneaked into one of the pavilions of Computex. This trade show is the second biggest in the world and is the place where the Taiwanese integrators sell their products to the big brands. This year the focus was in Broadband Wireless Telecommunications (Wimax in some variant) and on small cheap laptops. Basically all the companies where introducing some sort of Asus EEE PC clone.
Computex on Taipei 101
I didn’t have a lot of time to explore the trade show but in the few minutes I was there I didn’t see anything that caught my eye. Furthermore I think we visited the worst pavilion because none of the big Taiwanese companies where there. Indeed it was the pavilion where the Microsoft booth was. Of course I took a picture with one cute Taiwanese Microsoft hostess. You can see in the picture the interesting slogan Microsoft had in the Computex: “Better with windows!” encouraging people to use Windows on the sub 300 USD laptops.
Microsoft’s Taiwanese Hostess
Microsoft knows that they have a problem. As more of our time in front of computers is using web applications instead of desktop ones, more and more people will start using small cheap laptops. A huge chunk of the market is going to be on this small form laptops and they will probably replace all the normal laptops in the future. Microsoft is in a position where Linux is going to be eroding their user base. The problem is that vista will never run properly on these laptops (plus nobody likes vista) and must rely on Windows XP to compete with modern Linux distributions.
As LCDs are not anymore the stars in the trade shows, the manufacturers try
to attract attention showing ballistic missiles from the neighbor North Korea.
Next year they will try porn.
It will take time though because most of the cheap laptops in Computex were running Windows. I assume Microsoft marketing has something to be here, probably giving away for free or close to nothing the windows licences to the Taiwanese manufacturers. An intelligent positioning or a desperate move depending on your point of view but a sign that they are worried anyway.