Notebook for $200. First Step towards future computing.

Hello All,

I purchased my HP laptop with nominal configuration for $1400 in April, 2007. I am sure, that configuration is no longer available and even if it is, it would not cost more than $500. The competitive market is definitely helping the consumers to get a lot value for less money. Laptops with 4GB RAM and latest processor would cost someone around $800 these days. But where is the future heading? Are we going to see the laptop prices going down every day? Are we going to see a laptop with everything (Operating System, Hard Disk Data, and Applications) in the cloud (Cloud Computing) and only has a keyboard and display on the piece in our hand?

I was looking at this video on one of the news letter I read recently and thought this would be the first step towards the future of computing. The smart phones we use today is no less to a computer, except for the fact that you cannot install every possible application on it and of course the processors are not very powerful to run a bigger application. But, if you want to use your laptop to browse internet, check emails and respond to them immediately, and keep yourself updated about the issues going on around the world, don’t you think the smart phones these days are capable enough of doing that? The Blackberry Curve, The Instinct from Sprint, I-Phone with AT&T, HTC Touch Pro, and the most awaited phone of the year The Palm Pre, all these phones are as good as a laptop for internet browsing and email access. Some of these phones have applications which provide even better internet browsing experience than a laptop. The only negative point for the experience on the phone would be the size of the monitor and the keyboard. This could make the experience tiring and stressful if you have to deal with continuous browsing or responding to emails.

This was the inspiration for the company Celio Corp to design an external peripheral to the Smartphone without any Operating System or even a CPU. This great innovation is called the Redfly System and it merely has anything but a graphics processor to provide the necessary graphical experience to the user and a Bluetooth link to connect to the Smart Phone. The complete demonstration of this system can be viewed in the video that I provided above. This is not a completely new concept as Palm introduced something similar to this almost a year back. It was called the Palm Foleo. Please check this video about Palm Foleo. This video actually explains the need for an external display and keyboard very clearly.

Considering that Palm has done this already, you might be wondering what’s the importance and difference in this new Redfly system compared to the one that Palm introduced last year. The prize of the new Redfly System ($200) is very low compared to the Palm Foleo ($499) and technically the Redfly system is less complex than the Foleo as the later had a processor, Linux OS and some other basic applications on it. Another major advantage with the Redfly system is that, its platform independent compared to the Palm Foleo which can only be used with the Palm Smart Phones.

This seems to be a very good idea and it certainly caught the eyes of many major vendors in the smart phones industry. Have to wait and see how this external display device would enter the market and create a wave in the market. The company is ready to launch a device compatible with the Blackberry by the end of this year according to the article I read on the Mobile Handset Design Line website.

References:

1. EE Times for the Video.

2. http://www.mobilehandsetdesignline.com/ – for the Article and release news.

3. http://www.youtube.com/ – For the Palm Foleo Video.

If you have any comments or suggestions about the post, or if you have any updates to the current information provided, please feel free to add comments in the comments section.

Thank you very much for reading my blog.

Sincerely,

Krishna C. Emani.