Gadgetoid

gadg-et-oid [gaj-it-oid]

-adjective

1. having the characteristics or form of a gadget;
resembling a mechanical contrivance or device.

Welcome To The NetBook Band-Wagon

Well now every major laptop manufacturer has jumped firmly upon the netbook band-wagon with products that are ever growing in both size and price it’s time for the unlikelies to join the fray.

Two such contenders have so far stepped up to provide their horribly generic and probably re-branded offerings: Archos and CherryPal.

Rant warning. Proceed with caution.

First and foremost I’m absolutely beyond disappointed with Archos’s entry. Archos, a company who have a lovely but closed lineup of linux-based PMPs, instead of producing an ARM-based netbook, chose to re-brand another generic box-o-crap with specifications that weren’t impressive in 2007. *Clap clap* Stick to PMPs, please, it’s getting embarrassing and now we can all assume that your core products are failing so badly you need to flail about and throw cheap rubbish onto the Netbook market to stay afloat..

Second is the CherryPal “Bing”, a name that can’t help but sound like “Bling” every time that I read it. I have (or had) no idea what on earth a “Bing” Cherry was, so it’s clear I don’t fall into the fruit-scoffing, “green”, tree hugging, computer illiterate customer base that they’re trying to target. The Bing gets an entirely unremarkable 5 hours out of its battery, and is supposed to be “Green.” I’ll tell you what’s “green.” Not having a god-damned computer in the first place, genius.

This is the point of contention that really makes me fume if I waste time thinking about it. Anyone trying to be “green” or live a “green lifestyle” who is still buying, owning and using any electrically operated products, particularly disposable, obsolete-at-time-of-purchase crappy netbooks is, frankly, a whiny, hypocritical moronic trend-whore. If you want to minimise your impact on the environment, kill yourself. Preferably in a copse of trees where nobody will find you until your body has returned to the earth and played out its role as fertilizer.

Green Computing is an oxymoron!

The only Netbook entry I find in the least bit compelling is that from Sony. Of course, it costs a half gajillion pounds so all hope of ever getting my hands upon one has been dashed to the ground and stomped on repeatedly by an army of netbook-touting environmentalists.

The Sony P series may not have much in the way of specifications, but it’s just a sprinkling of Ubuntu linux away from being the ideal life partner.

Note: I intentionally avoided linking to any of the mentioned products, if you’re insane enough to have any interest in them whatsoever then Google is your friend. If you can afford the Sony P series and intend to install linux on it. I hate you.

Monday, January 19th, 2009, Blog.