[gui-talk] The new breed of notebook computer has arrived

[Don Moore]

Kim Komando indicated that it might work for kids, but if you shopped some of the Black Friday sales you'd have gotten a more powerful computer at a similar price.  It's not meant to be in the same league as the notebooks in the general market.
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Sherri" <flmom2006 at gmail.com>
To: "NFBnet GUI Talk Mailing List" <gui-talk at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Friday, November 30, 2007 12:39 PM
Subject: Re: [gui-talk] The new breed of notebook computer has arrived


That's pretty good! Of course, nothing like that would happen in the states.

Sherri
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Dane Trethowan" <grtdane at iprimus.com.au>
To: "NFBnet GUI Talk Mailing List" <gui-talk at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Friday, November 30, 2007 12:18 PM
Subject: [gui-talk] The new breed of notebook computer has arrived


Hi Everyone!
Well we have a new Government in australia and what does this have to  
do with the subject line of this message I hear you ask? Well during  
the Federal Election camping the incoming Labor Party promised to  
equip all High School students with a laptop/notebook computer and  
many people (including yours truly) wondered just how much this  
"equipping" process may cost.
Having just read an article in today's Australian newspaper, I doubt  
whether the cost  will be as high as it could have been if Mr Rudd  
(our new Prime Minister) decides to give out the new Asis notebook  
computer which has taken the U.S. by storm, in its first month of  
release over 10,000 units were sold, not bad.
So what's special about this new notebook computer and what sets it  
apart from the competition? Well firstly, the unit doesn't have a hard  
drive, It has 4 gigs of RAM for data I/O which can be expanded by the  
use of external hard drives or SD memory cards. The notebook itself  
has only 512 meg of RAM for running applications.
Now readers may think this amount insignificant compared to other  
notebooks which boast RAM in the "gigabyte" region but again we're  
talking about a different species of notebook here, this one runs  
"open source" software including a version of LINUX with a GUI so it  
looks like Windows to the user.
So what do you get with this thing? 4 USB ports, its Wi-Fi compatible  
and will run for 4 hours away from an AC power source, not too bad  
when you consider that this device is the size of a large paperback  
book with a 7-inch LCD display. The notebook machine has a cramped  
"qwerty"-style keyboard and I would imagine that you could plug-in a  
full-size keyboard to one of the USB ports.
Audio recording/playback is possible with the unit as it boasts both  
line-in/mic and line-out/headphone sockets.
I guess the next question will be whether some "clever dick" will be  
able to get this thing to run some sort of screen reader, will it be  
powerful enough to do that? The CPU is nothing to rave about at 750MHZ  
however that's perfectly adequate I would have thought for the tasks  
to which this notebook is likely to be paired.

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