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Low-cost laptops vs pricey competitors

By Andrew Brown (China Daily)
Updated: 2008-06-13 07:42

Can low-cost "laptots" stand up to their more pricey competitors?

Is there any point to buying a full-size laptop now that small, light and cheap ones are all the rage? For the past five years I have used IBM X series ThinkPads, which are light, and fairly small, but no one could call them cheap. The latest, the X300, competes directly with Apple's MacBook Air and costs a thousand dollars more than the little Linux-powered Asus Eee.

So if all you use a laptop for is reading and writing, what is the point of the extra money? Surely all you need is a keyboard, a screen, wireless and a couple of USB ports? Not that the expensive models from Apple and IBM/Lenovo offer much more than that.

I cannot be the only person thinking on these lines, because the price of secondhand laptops has fallen sharply, as I discovered last week when I had to make this choice for real because my daughter's old ThinkPad X31 died. The motherboard had failed. It wasn't a repair worth making. Besides, she's in the middle of important exams, and needed a replacement at once.

It looks obvious at first that a "laptot" - as the Eee-type notebooks are known to The Register - would be the right choice. They are in theory meant for students, though the only ones I have come across have been in the hands, or handbags, of grownups. They don't do distractions like CDs and DVDs, which has to be an advantage for work. And the laptot would be brand new.

All these advantages - even the last one - shriveled when I considered them more closely. In general, stuff made for students or aimed at that market is just not as well built or well thought out as stuff aimed at business people. I once dropped a ThinkPad one meter onto a hardwood floor. The battery never worked properly again, but everything else was unscathed.

A 3-year-old, lightly-used business laptop may well have more life in it than a brand new consumer item and will certainly be easier to get spares for.

Portability is fine within limits, but my daughter is not going to carry her laptop around from classroom to classroom - only from room to room at home. She probably carries it less than I carry mine, which I really do take from office to office, and to cafes where I would like to work. A CD drive isn't essential by any means, but it is intermittently useful.

But the real deciding factors were the three elements of any laptop that you interact with every day: the screen, the keyboard and the battery. The keyboards on ThinkPads are just marvelous. They are large, well laid out and with an excellent feel. Anything smaller - and the "laptots" are significantly smaller - is just harder to type on accurately and at speed.

Since the purpose of a student's laptop is to write, not read, this really matters. Large screens probably matter less than large keyboards. But I do think a 12-in [30cm] screen is notably better than a 9-in [23cm] one for writing on. There are more words on screen, or the letters are larger, or both. Finally, the "laptots" all seem to have deficient battery life.

This matters a great deal, since the purpose of this kind of computer is just to replace an A4 notepad with something as simple where you don't have to write all the content yourself, and they never run out of paper. So in the end I bought, on eBay, a reconditioned ThinkPad which came with a media slice that holds a spare battery (which, of course, we had from the defunct one) and an optical drive.

The idea of a two-piece computer - one that can be a simple and lightweight writing device when that is all you need, but also transform into a portable media center - is something that has never really caught on. I don't know why.

But some ideas like this are always being rediscovered: even the laptot is in some respects only a rediscovery of a lovely little black-and-white screened notebook computer that Hewlett Packard made in the early 1990s, although that relied on a modem for its Internet connection, and the batteries lasted for eight hours or more.

Perhaps the two-piece computer will come back in five or 10 years' time; folding screens will then connect to mobile phones, and be controlled from lightweight folding proper keyboards. We can but hope.

The Guardian

(China Daily 06/13/2008 page9)