French site MobileHub has gotten its hands on another
Eee competitor rip-off -- the
Airis' Kira 740 (aka, Kira 100) -- and has given it the rundown. The initial impressions are about what you'd expect, besides coming with XP onboard, having 1GB of memory, a VIA C7 1GHz CPU, and a traditional 40GB hard drive, the mini-laptop is almost identical to ASUS' entry. The screen resolution is the same 800 x 480, the keyboard is apparently a shot-for-shot remake, and it features familiar ethernet and WiFi networking options. You can see in the photo above that there are some minor physical differences, though in our opinion they've somehow managed to ugly it up + 30 percent. For €299 (or around $466) you can get yourself a Kira 740 sometime soon. Yay.
[Via
SlashGear]
posted Apr 29th 2008 3:04PM
How the hell is that a rip off? It doesnt look like the eee PC, it looks like an ultraportable laptop, and they all look similar!!!! Or is it just the new thing to say everything with a small screen, keyboard, and touchpad an eee ripoff??
Shut up pip!
OMG are you seriously talking about this one ripping off EEE? you've got to be joking... 'Almost identical to asus'? WTF.. the EEE is nothing special in design, it's just a smalllaptop and looks like any other laptop, only smaller.. Get real, and don't pretend the EEE is anything special except for the size..
and IMHO the kira 740 doesn't look anything like the EEE.. next time, put on your glasses...
Excessive use of IM acronyms are a sure way to highest (yes, highest, not highly) ranked. Also, thank you for ensuring us that it is, in fact, your opinion and not another's.
engadget is becoming pretty biased
ever heard of apple w/engadget? dont even talk
- http://www.stompergames.com
Any screen under 9 inches fu$*&^g sucks.
Seriously. There's nothing worth getting excited about until these cheap bastards up the ante on the screen sizes (and yes, I know they are already starting to).
It may be no rip off, but good god that's a nasty machine, I thought the bezel on the smaller EEE was oversized!
And 1GHz C7?! No wonder the machine in this picture is switched off, their original prototypes are still booting :)
totally agree
- http://www.stompergames.com
Seriously, laptops are designed in the same way, believe it or not - so they're going to look similar. I hereby officially start a petition to get this article title changed! All those in favour, say aye! :P
aye!
AYE
aye!
aye?!
Well if they all look the same, then it's not incorrect to say Eee lookalike in the title then is it? In the same manor they could say Kira lookalike in an Eee article, though the Kira doesn't deserve that :D
aye
aye!
And i must say...it has a completelydifferent hardware except for screen and keyboard...how the hell this is a ripoff?
Who cares about another stupid bloomin Eee ripoff? The market has been so saturated that it's starting to really bug me that Engadget is constantly reporting about them.
ARGH!
Engadget should put a counter for EEE like laptops
Of COURSE it's going to look like the EEE. The all do, including the ones being praised. There aren't a lot of options when you're building something that size. I agree that it's ugly, but it isn't identical as you claim. Please, you're starting to sound like a Mac fanboy.
It's the Eee, now with even MORE bezel! Just when you thought it couldn't get any worse!!
No doubt! At least Asus tried to mask it by putting the speakers on either size of the screen. This thing has more bezel than a Kaypro!
Only 30% on the ugly? You're going too easy on it. Everything about that design is just wrong.
I know it's a trite comment, but this time it truly would be more appropriate to compare the rounded silver edges to an iPhone.
I mostly agree with everyone that all small laptops are going to look similar, but that keyboard is a dead-on copy/paste if I ever saw one.
Really? Really??? Would you prefer a DVORAK keyboard? ;)
Wow...the layout of the actual keys, and the dimensions of the keys, are spot on. Pay attention. Of course it's a standard QWERTY keyboard, but the exact sizes and positions of the keys are the same.
Of course, you could be being sarcastic...but given the 4chan-like nature of these threads lately I had to be sure.
Having more bezel is like having more cowbell, i think that you can never have to much cowbell.
HEAR HEAR!!!
THAT WAS TO TIMMIY
The next ultraportable I buy has to have a 5" screen with a 32" bezel surrounding it!!
Oh no, a gadget site reports on... gadgets!
Okay, so the 'lookalike' angle is pretty damned weak, but since when did we come to engadget for the spectacular prose? ;)
I love my 4G EEE, but I'm selling it in a heartbeat and going with the company that can give me the same portability, but with a convertible laptop/tablet touch screen (7" 800x480 will do, but preferably 9" 1024x600), and sub $500... $400 is better...
That's got to be RIGHT around the corner, right?
are the editors blind? how is that an Eee look-alike / ripoff. the two computers look nothing alike the fact that both are black means nothing.
I really don't see the resemblance myself.
Unless you mean that the Kira looks like the inbred cousin of the city hottie.
Why do they write this stuff?
Because if they wrote "Here's another entry into the rapidly expanding ultraportable laptop market pioneered by Asus, but we feel this one is a bit too large and really should have a larger, higher resolution screen," no one would spend their time yelling about it.
Calm, rational, unbiased reporting doesn't get people reading anymore... You need to pinch their noses and poke their eyes so they're angry enough to come here and fight...
For everyone else's entertainment.
Bread and circuses, amigos... bread and circuses.
So basically blogs are becoming just like the old media they're trying to replace. Awesome.
It looks more like a LeapPad than an Eee. But I do like the name. If you type someone's name on it, will that person die?
Asus ripoff? I would not say it is. The more competition the better IMO. I have an older Thinkpad T23, its a lovely machine don't get me wrong but I am stuck downstairs looking after the house! The Thinkpad I have does not have the built in wireless, its too heavy and has an old battery life so its stuck to the dining table. I want to watch telly and walk around with a laptop but still have long life out of the battery, be able to run MAME (and make it so I can still afford the rent hehe), use it abroad etc I need one of these ultralites
EEEw.
Ugly design, huge bezel, Via processor?
What a waste of materials to make this POS. : (
Why is every small laptop an eee ripoff to Engadget?
This machine doesn't even share the same type of processor or hard drive. If anything it rips off the Everex Cloudbook which shares these specs exactly.
EEE, now with more janky.
i am started to get a little annoyed with smaller companies flooding the market with crappy umpcs. Why can't they just give up and leave the job to ASUS, Sony, MSI, and HP. They should stop trying to compete by making fugly machines that suck in performance.
Wait a minute...Kira.....so it's a death-note....book.
Someone should find out who manufactures these lappies. It's exactly the same as the Blue H1 (which sells for 16K Php/$400 here). And I'm getting tired of people saying it's an EEE rip-off. Other than the 7" WVGA screen, WiFi, and a few others, the EEE uses a faster Celeron and the other one uses a much bigger (though slower) 40GB hard drive. BTW, the one pictured looks like crap. I already saw it in different colors and it actually looks good.
And don't even fucking say it's crappy until you've tried it. I've already tried one in a store and the build is actually sturdier than the EEE PC. Haven't seen it startup yet though I'd expect the time to be abysmal compared to the EEE PC given the 1.8" 4200 rpm hard drive.
i have the kira 740 and its rather stupid to say they are the same: 1 gb of ram double then the EEE makes the toy fast. and while the EEE has no hard drive the 740 comes with a 40gb hard drive.
the screen resolution is 1024x768 though you need glasses to use it.
thats a laptop not a toy