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TNX-9500: the "world's cheapest laptop" live and hands-on
We were ready to fall in love with the Impulse NPX-9000 as soon as we heard the words "World's Cheapest Laptop," but now that we've got a review sample in our hands the bloom might be off this rose -- especially since the $199 wholesale price isn't even as cheap as the Dell Mini 9 on sale. On the other hand, there's something just delightfully janky about our Windows XP-powered unit, now labeled the TNX-9500 -- it beeped continuously for several minutes when we first turned it on, the 1GHz no-name processor seems less willing to run Internet Explorer than Richard Stallman on a bad day, and it took us several minutes to figure out that a loud howling sound was being produced by the always-on microphone feeding back through the speakers. Yet for some reason we were all smiles the whole time -- what can we say, we're suckers for cheap. Hopefully Impulse will stake a bolder claim to the title of "world's cheapest laptop" when production ramps up, since prices are expected to fall, but this particular unit actually can't get any cheaper for you -- we'll be giving it away soon. Check some shots in the gallery!
World's Cheapest Laptop may just be the world's cheapest laptop
We've gotta admire the functional naming here. "World's Cheapest Laptop." Hard to get that one confused with the world's almost-cheapest laptop, or similar pretenders. From what we can glean from this laptop's Alibaba page, it's built by Impulse, sports an NPX-9000 model number, and gives new meaning to the term craptop when it comes to specs. The 7-inch screen is accompanied by a 400MHz, MIPS processor, 128MB of RAM, 1GB of flash storage, and a few USB ports and an SD card slot. You'll be filling up one of those ports with a WiFi dongle, and we're guessing that SD card slot will be your lifeline for storing just about everything that isn't the Linux operating system. The wholesale price is $130 US, with a 50 unit minimum purchase. $6,500 for a laptop for you and 49 of your closest frenemies? We're sold.[Thanks, Seema R.]
