From Cnet.com: Meet the cheapest laptop in the world * Matthew Elliott From credit card debt and school loans to rising gas prices and adjustable mortgages, there are plenty of reasons why consumers in the developed world can't afford a laptop. Not to mention the fact that underfunded schools and underprivileged kids also exist in the developed parts of the world. Enter the Medison Celebrity laptop. It's a $150 laptop from Swedish company Medison that's available through the Columbus, Ohio-based online reseller 2Checkout.com. (Credit: Medison Europe Limited) With Nicholas Negroponte's OLPC hovering around $175, and Intel's Classmate PC expected to cost more than $200, the Medison Celebrity laptop can lay claim to being the cheapest laptop in the world. And it boasts an impressive feature set for the money. For starters, it features a large, wide-screen 14-inch WXGA display and weighs a reasonable 4.8 pounds. Powering the Medison Celebrity is a 1.5GHz Intel Celeron M 370 processor and 256MB of memory. You may scoff at such a meager memory allotment considering all the reviews out there that complain whenever a PC serves up less than 1GB these days, but the Medison Celebrity doesn't have to power Vista or any other flavor of Windows. Instead, it uses Fedora Linux, which requires less muscle to run than a Windows OS and no Microsoft licensing fee. Rounding out the specs are a 40GB hard drive, an integrated Via PN800 graphics chip, and 802.11g Wi-Fi. You also get stereo speakers, three USB 2.0 ports, and a PC Card slot. Medison backs the laptop with a one-year warranty but offers little detail about the terms. Medison takes orders in a variety of currencies, and it claims it will outfit the laptop with the appropriate keyboard. The company estimates it'll take four to six weeks to ship, but "availability of the Medison Celebrity model depends on how many orders we get per day." It also lists additional charges above the $150 price as $6.45 plus 5.5 percent "and extra" for its partner, 2Checkout.com. Is this $150 laptop too good to be true? Could be--I've tried all morning to place an order, but I keep getting an error message before I can even enter my credit card info and address. I'll keep trying, but it looks like Medison isn't quite ready to bestow Celebrity status on anyone with an extra $150 kicking around. I'll update this post should I get my order to go through. UPDATE: I successfully completed an order. And wouldn't you know, the $150 laptop ended up costing an even $150. Shipping was free, and no taxes or other charges were applied. I'll let you know when it arrives. Wow a laptop for $150 damn, even though the specs suck its still a good price...
lol cheap laptop this day... asus is planning to make some 7" laptop which is coming out soon... for $200.... and 10" from Asus is $300...
Hey, if this cheap laptop will be available in the regular shops I'm going to buy it; can be handy for when I'm on travel and if it gets stolen or anything happens to this cheapo laptop it won't hurt so bad as an expensive high end one.
wonder if this thing even packs a lithium battery or something since they cost over 100 for a regular laptop lol
By now must have heard about Medison' "world's cheapest" laptop, right? But behind this decently specsed lappie a big scam is going on, according to reader comments at Slashdot. People believes company' intention is to generate publicity and secure loads of orders by keeping the price down and then disappear with all the money. Many readers have pointed towards fishy things -- the domain name was registered in April 07, for a term of ONE YEAR only, email ids for company employees are at hotmail, phone is not working, no fax, company' contact address appears to be for a residential house in Kent etc. They even copied Apple's privacy policy, word by word. But now Medison has taken privacy page offline, I guess they are working on a new page (a little different from Apple's!). I think the best thing to do is to wait for the first laptop to ship.
^was reading and people have their doubts, but we wont really know until people who have ordered confirm whether they receive their orders or not But I wouldnt chance buying one yet, not that i would have use for such a laptop
lol linux is not just for hacking.... linux is just open sourced, they have loads of versions. Ive used ubuntu which is a great little free OS. If you only need to surf web and use word processing, spreadsheet, etc, etc then linux is fine, its great infact. It can be as pretty as Vista or Mac, if you know what your doing. you can forget gaming and driver support wont be great, but if you search hard enough you may get the drivers you need for the hardware you have
