Dell's done good things for the mainstream of the netbook market with its
Mini 10 series, keeping prices low and quality relatively high, and now it looks like that ever-alluring educational market is next on the table. The new Latitude 2100, which we've
spotted previously, harbors traditional netbook internals, with kid-friendly perks like colorful lids and a rugged rubberized design, along with options for a carrying handle, shoulder strap, antimicrobial keyboard, touchscreen LCD and a Dell Mobile Computing Station docking cart (which can manage and store 24 of them with a single Ethernet cable and single power cord). The netbook is going to be available today with options for Vista, XP or Ubuntu 8.10, and the base configuration retails at $369 -- though we're unsure how much cost the options like SSD, a 6-cell battery (3-cell is standard), touchscreen or Vista will be. In a perfect world, no child would have to suffer with one of those "spinning hard disks," corrupting all their Kid Pix masterpieces with every bump.
Update: Video added after the break.
posted May 19th 2009 12:01AM
like the touchscreen part. but if it's not handwriting support I see very limited appeal beyond about 3rd grade.
most high schools are now using full on tablets so this is definitely going to appeal only to elementary. and I question the need for 1 on 1 computers at that age anyway.
dude, what highschool are you referring to? at my highschool we still steal the mouseballs from the mice in our computer labs, only because they can leave a welt when thrown at high velocities and they bounce really high.
at my high school, the only mice we had were in the cafeteria
at my highschool, the only mice in the cafeteria are lunch
at my high school, the lunch in the cafeteria were only mice.
At my cafeteria, the only highschool in the mice was the lunch.
At only in the my miceschool high cafeteria lunch was we had.
at my school the only high mice were at lunch in the cafeteria
BALD WHITE DUDE IN A BLACK TURTLE NECK HERE, PUTTING AN END TO YOUR BANDWAGON WITH HIGH PRICES AND QUESTIONABLE QUALITY.
Bald white dude is always keepin the man down...
More to the point, even though cursive is still taught, it isn't used anymore. So I don't see that as a problem.
hypothetically that's probably the trend for most kids raised with computers eventually most of them will not know how to write legibly but be very adept at keyboard or joypad input devices and its kind, like texting instead of verbal communication... Even my cursive writing have gone down hill and it's probably from typing 2 much and writing less
ya i am not sure which HS uses tablets
i kinda want to go back to HS now
In Soviet Russia, both the highschool and cafeteria was inside the mouse...
i judge dee to have won this contest.
Needs a better graphics card
lol i forgot it wuz a netbook ;)
Needs a better laptop, more like.
Still a valid comment. Ion it and we can talk.
That looks like a fake putting green.
i wonder if the general public could buy these? id buy one of these if they are more toufh than a regular netbook
Looks like it already has a better keyboard. ;)
If my kid gets out of line then i'd approve of a teacher pitching one of these at his head.
I think it's a neat idea and would buy one these for my 8 year old before a normal netbook.
I am a self-proclaimed apple fanboy and for some reason I just want this. A dell of all things, too. But i can tell they are pulling out all the stops now.
.. and all the grade-school kids with macs will laugh at the kids toting those PCs.
When I was in grade school, there were 4 ancient Gateway workstation PC's with Pentium II processors and huge 15'' CRT monitors rocking Windows 98 for a class of 30. Kids these days have it so good... (the sad part is, this was only 7 years ago).
It's sad Apple doesn't have some super-cool gadget that said spoiled grade-school kids could use...
Uh... when I was in grade school we had commodore 64s.
That cart idea is pretty brilliant. Pop all of the laptops on there and reimage the whole lot of 'em, update software, etc. Very inventive.
My HS got grant money for computers in ~01 and they had these carts. Roll it in from computer lab, plug in the power and ethernet. There were individual power cords in each 'slot' you had to plug the laptops in with. I think the cart had a wireless access point as well; don't think school had full wireless yet. Unless these are drastically differend, old news.
Thinking back, I don't recall if there was full-on docking, though...that may be the difference I was missing.
Yeah, it's like a rolling rendering farm waiting to happen.
Man, I hate to be the one to say it - but they're late to the game. A lot of companies have offered this including Apple. They had a cart which took their laptops and At Ease software.
I just noticed that there's no title in this page. It only says "http://www.engadget.com/2009/05/19/dell-debuts-colorful-new-latitude-2100-netbooks-for-education/". Hmm...
no read link either
Wow I like the look of this thing more then many of the "adult" oriented netbooks on the market. Tho I should mention that I own an OLPC. Hey if they can make a 6-cell battery for it that doesn't make it look like it has elephantiasis I might be down for one.
long live VGA!!!
Hahah
There's around a million OLPC-using kids in Africa right now looking at the photos of this thing and thinking, "I can has?"
I LOVE DELL,SHE IS CUTE,AND WANT TO WIN HER IN MY ARMS.
For folks who are interested in seeing a bit more detail and a couple of videos, take a look at this post on Direct2Dell: http://bitly.com/1boP1T.
Thanks,
LionelatDell
Lionel: The new "Dude youre gettin a Dell!" guy.
Hehe.. well. I'm not that good looking. And I'm more of a hardware geek than he was.
LionelatDell
Were people as paranoid about bumps as they are today before the appearance of SSD's?
No, but then again we werent that paranoid about car wrecks before seatbelts either.
i honestly don't understand the point of these when you can get a great lenovo computer for like 500$ when they go on sale. www.pierreb.ca
damn you...
Why the hell do you put a link to an unfunctionnal page?
I was thinking pierreb was the next big thing, but pfffffffff... only wind.
For the folks who were asking about the 6-cell battery, here's a pic from our Flickr page: http://bitly.com/10EoNy. Bottom line, it's big, but it works pretty well and provides a nice typing angle on the keyboard.
I also think the rubberized case works really well. Makes this thing pretty easy to carry around.
I assume it won't fit in the cart with a 6-cell battery?
Are you a vampire?