Elonex One: England's 100 quid laptop

Everybody and their mother's got a super-budget laptop these days (see: OLPC, Eee PC, Cloudbook, Pixel Qi, etc.), and next at the table will apparently be Elonex, which intends to introduce the £100 (~$200) One on February 28th at The Education Show in Birmingham, England. Obviously the intention here is to sell to education markets, but the One is also going to be up for grabs for "adult learners, business users, people who are constantly mobile, elderly people and first time internet users." We don't have any better shots of the thing, but apparently this One (not that One, or the other One) will weigh "less than a kilo" (2.2 pounds), has a 7-inch screen, three hour battery, 1GB of flash memory, and runs on Linux. Apparently there's also a more expensive £120 model that has double the memory (2GB) and Bluetooth, to boot. Both will also have access to a service called ONEunion, which will "feature artwork and music for download, opportunities to get your own content added to the club as well as a range of competitions," presumably for the kids. More on this thing later this month, aye guv'na?

[Via Times Online]

Update: jkkmobile's got some additional info. Looks like the One could be a rebadge of a Fontastic A-View ultra-cheap Chinese "simple PC". Not that we're really surprised -- we mean, who the hell are Elonex to pop out of nowhere with this thing?

[sinjinn @ Feb 17th 2008 3:12PM]

wow . £100 is a very low price, we usually get stiffed over here.

[superfresh @ Feb 17th 2008 11:39PM]

Please, PLEASE can we get away from the 7 inch screen!

[Jason @ Feb 18th 2008 10:54AM]

Yeah...with all that extra space around the screen, they could have used at least an 8-inch instead.

[Alan @ Mar 5th 2008 4:38PM]

Has anyone noticed this company has gone into liquidation about 5 times at least. I could sell topend Dell laptops for £100 if i didnt bother to pay Dell and owed my creditors £2.5M!! Dont expect any warranty :)

[Graham @ Feb 17th 2008 3:16PM]

So judging by the picture the monitor separates from the keyboard? Man i would lose one of those parts for sure. Be typing away then the monitor fall off the desk beside me and I accidentally email that one picture to my mom =P

[Erik @ Feb 17th 2008 3:57PM]

Just like you lose that removable battery all the time? If it is removable, there must be a lock of some sort.

[Graham @ Feb 17th 2008 4:00PM]

wow, thats brilliant. See the thing is, you dont use a removable battery when its removed. With the removable monitor thats kind of the whole point. And no, I really doubt it is where it just sets on the keyboard with no lock or anything waiting to break.

[Aidan @ Feb 17th 2008 3:21PM]

Aww Ryan. It died with the "Aye Guv'na" But anyway, that's pretty good for 100 quid.

[Imran @ Feb 17th 2008 3:43PM]

Yep, haven't met anyone that says guvna in my life.

[Erik @ Feb 17th 2008 3:54PM]

cheerio! would have worked much better.

[Cal @ Feb 17th 2008 4:24PM]

I've never met a Geordie-Cockney hybrid...

[trevor @ Feb 17th 2008 4:31PM]

I've met plenty of people who say guv'na... but they're all Americans.

And theater students.

[Abuzar @ Feb 17th 2008 6:51PM]

I think he was trying to go with the Aloo Guv'na phrase. I was pretty popular lack year.

[Daniel D @ Feb 17th 2008 9:30PM]

Yeah Ryan why don't you try and stick to reporting instead of just confirming how ignorant Americans are about other nationalities, I know it's asking alot....

[Naveed @ Feb 17th 2008 3:23PM]

wow, monitor seperation would be cool. sheds off half the weight if all you needed to do was dock it at work

[crystalsinger @ Feb 17th 2008 11:42PM]

Yeah, except, um no.

From the size of it, it looks like all the processing power is tucked in behind the ~monitor~ not the keyboard.

Is it touchscreen?

[EdZ @ Feb 17th 2008 3:33PM]

I wonder if you could purchase the 'base' separately from the monitor? It would make for a great cheap headless mini-server.

[bartoron @ Feb 17th 2008 3:35PM]

That's a cheap laptop!

Though to be honest, I'm fine with my laptop as it is. I got it yesterday for $499, and it has a 1.8 gHz AMD Athlon 64 X2 TK-55 processor, 2 GB of DDR2 RAM, a 160 GB hard drive, and a dual layer DVD burner. I love it.

[bartoron @ Feb 17th 2008 3:35PM]

That's a cheap laptop!

Though to be honest, I'm fine with my laptop as it is. I got it yesterday for $499, and it has a 1.8 gHz AMD Athlon 64 X2 TK-55 processor, 2 GB of DDR2 RAM, a 160 GB hard drive, and a dual layer DVD burner. I love it.

[fastolfe @ Feb 17th 2008 3:47PM]

Yeah but how portable is yours? 2lbs is great travel weight, especially if you're carrying other things like text books.

[Jason @ Feb 18th 2008 10:39AM]

And how long would the battery lasts with a 1.8 GHz CPU, 160 GB HDD, and DVD Burner? Less than 2 hours?

[bartoron @ Feb 18th 2008 11:29AM]

Actually, up to 3 hours if you have the screen brightness turned down all the way (which is still very bright).

[mothity @ Feb 17th 2008 3:52PM]

haha, we don't all talk like "guv'na" you know. and for future reference, thats 2 dialects mixed together. northeners say 'aye' and southerners say 'guv' (although to be honest you probably wont hear anyone say it)

[paul-engadget @ Feb 17th 2008 3:55PM]

it looks like an oversized nokia 770 tablet! elonex don't exactly have the higest rep in the UK for cutting edge quality stuff, so it's got to be some cheap Chinese tablet which has been hacked together to run linux a bit.

with all these cheap PCs and MIDs around running linux, I hope the linux distro is good enough to stop it getting a bad rap as a crappy OS.

[w00t @ Feb 17th 2008 4:18PM]

What kind of quality were you expecting for 100 notes exactly?!?

[John Bailey @ Feb 17th 2008 4:32PM]

What will be more interesting is finding out how many schools were stupid enough to sign up to one of the Windows licenses that insisted every computer in the school was counted even if it couldn't run Windows, and find out they can't use these because they have to have a Windows license for each one.

[TIMMAH! @ Feb 17th 2008 4:00PM]

Sounds like everyone's working off of the same basic reference platform. I expect to see a whole slew of similar offerings this year.

[cmj2405 @ Feb 17th 2008 4:03PM]

God, enough with the English sterotypes!!
And it's the UK, not just England!!!

[r3loaded @ Feb 17th 2008 4:08PM]

Och aye, laddie!

[StephenD @ Feb 18th 2008 1:34AM]

God, enough with the Scottish sterotypes!!
And it's the UK, not just England & Scotland!!!

[Jamma @ Feb 18th 2008 2:15PM]

Baaaaaaaaa

[nh @ Feb 18th 2008 7:23PM]

God, enough with the Welsh sterotypes!!
And it's the UK, not just England, Scotland & Wales!!!

[BigTeebo @ Feb 17th 2008 4:09PM]

We've been needing budget laptops for years. We've seen the decline of the price of desktop PCs, but haven't seen any decrease in portable computing prices. The EEE seems to be the first of(hopefully) many.

[Gremlin @ Feb 17th 2008 4:14PM]

Wow, this looks really great. That price is amazing is they actually stick to it.

The burning questions I'm left with are Capable of running XP? Screen resolution? Processor? Media card reader? # of USB ports? What type of WiFi?

[ReggieXuk @ Feb 17th 2008 6:15PM]

exactly, you cant just post the shell and expect us to get exicted

[Gremlin @ Feb 17th 2008 6:44PM]

After seeing the updated image for this post, I have to say its absolutely hideous. The design team really dropped the ball on this one. What's with these ultra-portable (ahem cloudbook) laptops looking like utter garbage?

The eeepc doesn't look breath-taking by any means, but it looks pretty standard in form and puts its competition to shame in terms of aesthetics.

[Syke @ Feb 17th 2008 4:29PM]

Oooh...

Hrm... wait a minute.. there's no point to removing the keyboard from the monitor unless there's also someway to navigate on the monitor with touch! Either that or it's just meant to be used as a fancy picture frame... :D I like it!

[Gremlin @ Feb 17th 2008 4:53PM]

Elonex does make digital picture frames and at $200, with wi-fi, usb, and possibly a media card reader, this would serve as a great option for a digi-photo frame after the laptop has served you for a few seasons or just when its not in use. Nice observation.

[Syke @ Feb 17th 2008 4:30PM]

*Then reads article* OH so it had a planned touchscreen that was dropped... darnit.

[fourthletter @ Feb 17th 2008 5:06PM]

Has anyone at engadget ever studyed geography ?
"Elonex One: England's 100 quid laptop" I think the term you were looking for was "Britain's 100 quid laptop" said laptop is sold in England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and the Channel Islands. These places collectively are the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland they share a common government and currency.
A bit like saying Texas' cheapest laptop, when said laptop is for sale across the USA.
If blog sites actually want to be respectable media then perhaps try going beyond just using a spell check ;)

[mj @ Feb 21st 2008 8:06AM]

I think you will find that it is the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

[fourthletter @ Feb 21st 2008 8:19AM]

Yeh thanks for that nerdish comment I'm from Northern Ireland so thats not exactly news.

[matt byrne @ Feb 17th 2008 5:28PM]

Where are Elonex computers based? If their head-office is in England, Ryan is correct. Just a possibility...

As for Aye Guv'na, well, I do hear a lot of 'aye' from Northerners in my current job, but more likely to hear 'that's the kiddy' from Southeasters, than Guv'na

[StephenD @ Feb 18th 2008 1:38AM]

Well by that token, the headline should be "Bromsgrove's first 100 quid laptop".

Of course, that would be stupid - so let's stick with the country, and not try to sweep our ignorance under the carpet.

[kris @ Feb 17th 2008 5:35PM]

I don't get it - you can remove the monitor and use it like a "tablet" - but they nixed the touchscreen? So an input-less tablet?

Also this means that the hardware is in the screen? So the keyboard portion is just a keyboard, and unusable on its own.

riiight.

But - this does raise a good idea - could someone feasibly make a Eee tablet? I know you can add a touch screen; but it'd be cool if someone could shove everything into a little tablet form; or at least stick a flip hinge onto the monitor?

[Jason @ Feb 18th 2008 12:01PM]

I think Asus did suggest they might develop a tablet version of the Eee PC but later cancelled it, citing lack of consumer interests. Once people get used to the $399 entry point, I seriously doubt they're willing to pay extra premium on top of that just for a tablet version.

[nonamo @ Feb 17th 2008 5:35PM]

Asus eee - US $200 -> UK £250

This thing - UK £100 -> US '~$200'

Rip off britain sucks!

[John @ Feb 17th 2008 5:48PM]

Asus EEE for $200? It's $400, pal.

[Ryan Skelley @ Feb 17th 2008 5:48PM]

http://www.fontastic.com.tw/aview.jpg

If you look at that image it shows the screen has a mouse and buttons on the back. So basically you control the mouse from behind whilst viewing the screen. Pretty smart but ergonomic like a brick i should think.

[Chebwa @ Feb 17th 2008 6:00PM]

Just because something is cheap, doesn't mean it's worth it.

I think this is the perfect product to reinforce that point.

HIDEOUS.