Asustek firms up Classmate PC plans, prices starting at $249

While we already knew that Asustek was planing to build some low-cost laptops based on Intel's Classmate PC platform (the reference design of which seen above), we didn't quite have a complete picture of exactly what the company had in store. Asustek's now clearing things up a bit further, however, revealing that the systems will in fact be sold under the Asus brand, with production set to begin in July. Unfortunately, it looks like they won't come in at the $199 price point we heard earlier, instead starting at $249 and going all the way up to $549 (with four different models falling in that range). Not so clear, however, is how far each of those will vary from Intel's reference design, which centers around a 7-inch LCD, Celeron M 900 processor, and a mere 256MB of RAM.

[(Unverified) Posted May 4th 2007 2:37PM]

As it's the case for all of Asustek's laptops, it's oooooooooooverpriced.

[(Unverified) Posted May 4th 2007 3:00PM]

well, if it's linux that's going on thoes laptops, the specs are more than enugh

[(Unverified) Posted May 4th 2007 4:05PM]

Why is it that when someone creates a 'cheap' laptop/pc, they always have to stick it in a nasty looking shell! Surely a regular laptop case would suffice...

[(Unverified) Posted May 4th 2007 3:16PM]

umm... what was the point of these again?
since when do low income families have $250 to blow on an m900 processor with 250mb of memory?

[Muu Posted May 4th 2007 3:26PM]

An affordable PC to allow every child to have a PC at school, just as they're realizing it doesn't do them any good to have one in classes. Beautiful.

[(Unverified) Posted May 4th 2007 3:40PM]

It did good for me when I had one.

Typing notes takes a lot less time than writing them.

[brentos Posted May 4th 2007 4:15PM]

Asustek was planing? Like planing wood? Interesting. If you ask me, they should have spent more time PLANNING.

[(Unverified) Posted May 4th 2007 7:35PM]

These laptops need the following:
- long battery life
- compatible parts
- simple, yet solid/rugged design (this stupid clamshell reminiscent of those iMac G3 laptops is a BAD idea), though a carrying handle is a good one...
- bluetooth (wifi is good, but why? Each "teacher" laptop could have a bluetooth "master" unit, and all the kids could sync with the teacher when they got to class. Distributed teaching would be simple at that point, and kids wouldn't waste their time on facebook or myspace or MSN like the rest of us do with real laptops...)
- stripped down OS (whether it's Linux or Windoze or OSX or whatever, it has to NOT be frilly. Function and speed over media enhancements.

Anyways, just my $0.02

If it's going to be cheap, make it functional.

[(Unverified) Posted May 7th 2007 8:02PM]

For use in just schools or as a first computer for a child, I don't see a problem with these. They have everything a basic computer need to fill it's role as a word processor, web browsers and any simple daily computing tasks.
That little thing is something I might look at picking up to replace my old Toshiba, that's both heavy and slow. It's be used for the same purpose, just if it's has Wifi I can email my own notes to myself rather then have to use some media (floopy) to move it off the hard drive.
And lastly $250 is not expensive, I bought a new laptop or school a few months ago at $400. Something that's almost half that is exciting, even if it's limited in power I'd still get one for note taking in classes, to fool around with or give it to a friend who has a 7 year old daughter.

[(Unverified) Posted May 9th 2007 8:41AM]

IMHO the cheap laptop is the PDA, or the smartphone. If you need keyboard, a stripped down version of the HTC Universal will work.
Is two years old, so probably obsolete to United States or Europa Wireless telephony carriers "The damn thing is almost more of a mini-laptop than a phone, but the specs are tight: Windows Mobile 5.0, built-in QWERTY keyboard, UMTS/WCDMA, a large, rotating VGA touch screen, 1.3 megapixel digital camera, 96MB of ROM, 128MB of RAM, 520MHz Intel XScale processor, SD memory card slot, WiFi, and Bluetooth." as reviewed by Engadget.
http://www.engadget.com/2005/05/30/the-htc-universal-gets-back-in-black/