Lots of people like the idea of the UMPC, until they see the price--some north of $1100. It's unfortunate. There have been lots of reasons bantered about as to why the prices are so high. Most sound like uninspired excuses to me. The devices were designed with low-cost, off the shelf components in mind and somewhere, somehow that reasoning vanished. I don't get it.
Anyway, now we hear that Asustek is going to be launching Classmate PCs (based on Intel's design specs) in the $249-$549 range that are surprisingly similar to UMPCs in terms of their core specs: 900MHz M ULV Celeron, 7" display (800x480) and 256MB of DDR-II memory, and WiFi. One difference is that the Classmate PC includes a keyboard and the Classmate PC uses a tiny 1GB flash drive.
Odd. So either that extra bit of memory in most UMPCs is worth about $500 or the fact that it doesn't have a keyboard presses the price to an extreme $1000. Sounds fishy to me.
If Intel and the OEMs are able to bring to market computers in this range and the OEMs don't rethink their positioning of UMPCs, the UMPCs are all but dead at least in the education market.
Now over the years, I've heard many low-ball prices quoted before new equipment comes to market. This may be one more case of this, so I'm not exactly holding my breath. We'll have to see if these prices are maintained.
However, it's clear to me that Microsoft's Origami concept has some stiff competition and much of it is Intel inspired. Couple weeks back at Beijing IDF Intel announced several UMPC-like Linux-based devices (called Mobile Internet Devices--MID) and now Asustech is talking about cheaper, lower-cost UMPC-like, Intel spec'd laptops. At times like this, I fall back on my old addage, "Follow Intel. The market goes where Intel goes." Is Intel behind the UMPC or have they moved on? Which side of the track is Microsoft going to be on now? Stand behind their UMPC design and nourish the UMPC hardware and software ecosystem or let Intel lead and switch to these other platforms? ThoughtFix has some thoughts on the MID vs UMPC competition that's worth checking out too.
The reason I'm thinking about this is that Silverlight and similar technologies could have a huge impact here--for getting applications running on these inexpensive devices.


Incremental Blogger