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August 29, 2005
Mad for laptops
Let's start to think about the new market that's being unleashed by the arrival of the $999 price point for portable PCs. According to IDC (quoted in Computer Daily News) this year's second quarter sales jumped 25 per cent over those of the first quarter, and were up 53 per cent over the same period of 2004.
That means a lot more people are going to be buying Wi-Fi hubs, and iBurst, and possibly Telstra's EV-DO. It means a lot more people are going to be searching for vacant power plugs in cafes etc. Which makes us feel a little glum, although the long battery life of the Toshiba Portege R200 means we don't really have to worry about such things much any more. That's one reason why we'd never consider buying a $999 laptop. One of the many things that are sacrificed in order to reach that price point is battery life.
But Hewlett Packard and Acer are obviously riding high on the trend. They've overtaken Toshiba as joint leaders of the portable PC segment.
Toshiba can't be all that unhappy, however, because their high-end Qosmio range is still going gang-busters. This is the phrase that killed our interest in Qosmio: "Less than 10lbs." Umm. That's 4.5kg, forgowdsake. The Qosmio G20 costs a mere $5999 (which gets you a 17-inch screen, 160GB hard drive and a 2.13GHZ Pentium 770 CPU). But we imagine it's difficult to get one of those gorgeous wide "Trubrite" screens open in economy class. Which would hamper one's enjoyment of all those entertainment options.
Posted by cw at August 29, 2005 10:14 AM
Comments
I think the likes of high-end Qosmio is not for you to bring around. It's classify as multi-media centre. It should stay in you living room/study.. But at 6K.. It will be hard to find a market.. since Dell's 9300 is only around 3-4K with a similar spec. Plus it has a much better 6800GO GPU
Posted by: Ekka at August 30, 2005 01:25 PM