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
Wow, carrying these with just the shoulder strap as pictured screams "Rob me!"
yeah, that and "make fun of me forever"
Im happy I live in a better country. I could leave my laptop and slr camera on the top of my car and it will be there tomorow. No kidding. Japan rock. On the other hand we have lot of perverts... damn.
Stealing is so last century! ;P
green, love that
i just wanna ask if you can download lime wire and itunes in this laptop(dell mini 10)?
Duh. Its a computer. You can download Limewire and iTunes to a computer.
He probably use a mac...
Yeah, the Mac Dell Mini 10 Latitude.
Dear John,
Please, go to a hypnotist right now. Ask him that question. You will feel sleepy, and probably wake up not remembering what happened. You will go to your computer and type "engadge" but for some reason you just can't get your finder to the t. The rest of the world will then rejoice.
It's a great idea. Ideally students wouldn't need to carry heavy books, saves paper for taking notes, provides access to educational online sites.
I just can't get over how elegant and simple this approach is, especially for elementary aged kids. The school district my sister works for has a wide variety of hardware spread around in the classrooms. It would be great in her school to be able to easily wheel a computer lab with 24 identical computers into a classroom whenever it was necessary. Even if you had a dedicated lab classroom, you could devote more space to students and less to cables and boxes, and you could still use the room for something else at a moment's notice.
Does the cart double as an access point? Even if it didn't, you could just duct tape one to it.
That + a box of crayola = win.
If they bring that to japan, im gonna get one for my kids. I really dig the look of it.
Make one with better spec for adult too!! I love the color top.
That has to be the ugliest laptop ever!
And you care about nothing but looks? :).
maybe they should implement serious style and innovation such as Apple by (Rounding Edges)
Why would a school need a 'computer lab' almost any class room in the school should be suitably equipped :). maybe some high end supercomputing tucked away somewhere.
if only they could persuade those liberals at school not to buy expensive macs and get kick backs...
i dont think they are liberals
just stupid, and wasting school money.
How are they wasting money? They get much better value for maybe 300$ more than this.
Why only XP Home, Vista Home Basic and Ubuntu?
I work for a school district and if we got these we'd want to join them to our school domain for shared folders, group policies, etc. With Home we wouldn't be able to join the domain.
"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."
Perhaps not in a perfect world, but is that true even in OUR world?
I know the Engadget staff has some kind of paranoiac fear of spinning platters - but really - they don't come hurling out at high speed to disembowl you. They don't crash everytime you pick up a laptop. They're actually pretty robust. We've read lots of stories even here on Engadget where a laptop is trashed but they managed to get the hard drive out and recover it.
SSD has some inherent cost/reliability/durability issues of its own. Right now, HD is running around $1 to $2 a GB for 2.5" drives. SSDs, considerably moreso. A system that routinely backs up these laptops when they're docked is a far cheaper solution (and - guess what - more reliable too).
So, can we please give the anti-HD thing a rest? They're not going away anytime soon and not everyone has the same issues with it you do.
Instead, how about some useful information like: will the general public be able to buy them? When will they be generally available? A link to the page at Dell for this product would be kind of useful.
Actually - I'm WAY overstating the price for HD in that post. 500GB drives are around CDN$150, so they're actually around 30 cents a GB.
I saw some questions about Dell's Mobile Computing Station... it does accommodate systems with 3-cell or 6-cell batteries. It does include a wireless access point and supports wired Ethernet as well. IT Admins can push things like security updates, new drivers, etc. to update some (or all) of the systems in the cart. Pretty cool stuff.
Thanks,
LionelatDell
Now that's an attractive netbook!
I actually know someone in a school district who took a look at these Dells in person a while back, before the official announcement. (He was under NDA at the time, but now that these have been officially announced, it doesn't matter.)
He evaluated the prototypes, and found that these were probably the best netbooks available for a school setting. In fact, the district loved them so much that he purchased at least one cart each for each of the schools in their district.
Oh, and these look very nice, even for consumer or business use... and I like the Linux option, too. Nice to have a choice other than Windows.