Guangzhou Skytone Transmission Technologies Company, which we will absolutely never call by its full name again, has just dropped a juicy nugget about its forthcoming netbook. If you'll recall, we recently
caught wind of the ARM-based,
Android-powered rig (the Alpha 680), which is expected to be a stripped down portable useful for web surfing and light duty Office use. Nixon Wu, Skytone's co-founder, recently confessed that it's aiming to sell the machine for around $250, and if all goes well, it should have prototypes ready by June and final products ready for consumption a month or two after that. Call us crazy (or just greedy, really), but we were totally hoping for this to ring up at $199 or less.
posted Apr 26th 2009 2:18AM
very nice i cant wait to start seeing more android devices
Very nice I can't wait to see $99 tegra device beating crap out of this crap (leaving only price drops).
Sorry to burst your bubble, but from everything I've heard, the only reason we haven't seen a Tegra device yet is because the tech is still way too expensive... I would love if someone has a link to prove me wrong, because I wanted to see Tegra LAST year, and we're into Q2 of THIS year and still not even an announcement (that I know of ) of a Tegra powered device.
@Levi
"Expensive" has a lot of meanings, including "profit I won't be receiving if I sell a device for $99 while I could be selling the same stuff for $250".
Kinda ugly.
My thoughts also, looks too much like a kiddies/OLPC computer.
@MikeWard
Thats what I thought because of the Android logo... It looks like the antennas on the OLPCs.
Now that's one hell of a catchy company name. Rolls right off the tongue like "Apple" and "Dell". Unfortunately, the Girl Scouts Treasure Trails Council and Groupwise Space Time Trellis Coded systems are already in a nasty trademark lawsuit worthy of Monster Cable.
So it'll be a Skytone netbook. I think I'll buy one, just so I can call it a skynetbook.
More seriously, it looks ok, but ARM11 is last year's tech. It's actually decent competition to an N810 (which is the same resolution, same ARM core, and clocked at 400MHz instead of 533, but fits in your pocket) -- and if you can find them in stock, N810s are running $220-240ish. So this is a little cheaper, a little more powerful, and a good bit bigger.
But it'll be blown away by the next generation of internet tablets, with ARM Cortex processors, and probably coming out around the same time. (And, to be fair, they'll have higher prices to match their higher performance and portability.) I just think it's later than I'd want to be introing an ARM11 design, because at this point you're condemning yourself to low-end only until your next major redesign, where a family of Cortex designs could cover a broad swath...
FAIL!!!!
my $229 ipod touch PWNS the living shit out of this sacked up piece of filth.
And did someone say Android? What a joke.
OSX FTW
FAKe!!!!!!11
Go back to bed, kid.
Ya? And Im sure your iPod Touch has a 7 inch swivel screen with 800x480 resolution, expandable memory, a 533MHz processor, and dont forget the most obvious WIN for this netbook vs the iPod Touch is the PHYSICAL KEYBOARD. Sorry, I'd own one of these, pop in a 32GB SD card and it would beat the shit out of your iPod Touch, even a Nokia N800 would PWN your iPod Touch.
you can't compare an mp3 player to a laptop.
Being the fist Android-based netbooks, it's probably not going to be the best Android-based netbook. The overall design (clamshell + tablet) makes sense, but I'd probably wait and see what Asus, Acer and MSI has up their sleeves. I'm sure we'll see a $199 version before long.
Ditto. With netbooks flooding the market, $200 is the sweet spot that will make me pull the trigger, and not for some LAME 3 cell battery. THREE CELL BATTERY (2.5 hours, if lucky): WHAT THE F$%K were these vendors thinking?
Let's see, would you rather be named Bush or Nixon?
Waiting for the ARM version of Ubuntu on a $199 ARM netbook with a multitouch screen.
Call me when they put out a tablet, otherwise I really don't see the allure of Android on a PC footprint.
yes, but also, add GPS
Why would you leave android on this thing? Its got to be way more fun (read versatile) with some kind of ARM linux build on it.
Android is built off of an ARM Linux Kernel
At first, I was like, just get an Android phone, or spend the extra $50 on a netbook with XP... but then I had to ask, does Android have the Microsoft Office suite for it? Is there enough apps for it yet to really be a viable competitor in the netbook market with XP running on many of them, and very competent Linux systems? Cause if Android really can compete here, that's a pretty damn nice price for a netbook, and it's a tablet? You gotta be kidding. If it's good enough for college kids to do their HW and take notes, as well as maybe watch YouTube, this thing looks mega-useful.
I could see these things getting integrated into college classrooms or being used in a similar environment, then the notes could be saved to the removable SD card and popped into a laptop/desktop to be used elsewhere. Also, my G1 has support for txt, doc, and pdf files on the go so ya, it has the capability of being used for an MS office type applications. The doc viewers arent that expensive either on the market and if this netbook goes mainstream, i could really see an OpenOffice or MS Office suite being programmed for it, if the feel the money is there. People would buy it.
LOL no thanks. At $99, this would have been awesome. $129, it would have made sense. $250? Horrible.
I understand how it would have been awesome, but Skytone would probably go bankrupt too. ;)
@MeowR-
Nvidia showed a prototype netbook based on their Tegra CPU that was supposed to cost $99. And its not bankrupt yet. But on $250 product you make, lets say, $50 profit (1/5) and on $99 you make what? $20? So which one would you prefer, $50 or $19?