Discussions

A company called Always Innovating is promising in the past couple of months the release of a netbook with detachable keyboard and 10 to 15 hours of battery life for only USD 299. What is the catch?

The trick to get such low price and battery life is on the components chosen. First it uses a Texas Instruments OMAP3 chip, which is practically an entire computer inside a single integrated circuit, including processor, memory controller and video controller. The drawback is that it doesn’t run Windows XP or Vista, you will have to be happy with the Linux-based Touch Book OS (which will still be a beta version when the netbook arrives at the market), but you can install other flavors of Linux or even Windows CE.

No hard disk drive is used: storage is based on an 8 GB micro SD flash memory card. And who can live with only 8 GB these days? It can be replace with a bigger model, though.

Touch Book will have an 8.9” touchscreen display with 1024 x 600 resolution and will measure 9.4" x 7" x 1.4" (23.9 x 17.8 x 3.5 cm) and weight only 2 Lbs (900 g). Other hardware specs include six USB 2.0 ports, with three of them being internal (so they don’t take up space around the product) and one of them using the mini format, a 3D acelerometer (like the iPhone and Mac laptops), support for Bluetooth and IEEE 802.11b/g/n wireless networking standards.

From the hardware specs this product looks like more Nicholas Negroponte’s OLPC gadget – which so far has been nothing more than a buzz, by the way – than a real netbook.

The design of the product, on the other hand, is striking. The keyboard can be entirely removed from the product, transforming it into a small touch-based computer – or a big fridge magnet, as the manufacturer suggests. You can also operate the screen at a different height, as shown on the picture.

Only time will tell whether this innovative idea will be successful or not. What do you think? Would you buy this netbook?