Have no fear, the $99 laptop is here
Or is it?
JOINTECH’S JL7100 laptop is apparently ready to sell – but is this actually a laptop or just a glorified PDA?
The JL7100 looks like a laptop, and Jointech is selling it as a laptop, but the machine has the inner soul of a Windows Mobile PDA.
But – does anyone really care? For $99 we can’t really complain, plus the specification isn’t so bad either.
With a 7inch 800 x 480 pixel display, VGA output and three USB ports the JL7100 doesn’t come up too badly.
However, it has just 64MB of RAM, 64MB of storage and runs the slightly pants Windows CE 5.0 operating system.
All we know about what powers the beast is that it's a "Samsung 400MHz chipset."
It is up to you to weigh up the good and bad points of this ‘laptop’ but we still think that for $99 it’s a bargain.
The JL7100 should be available to buy now, although Jointech seems to be a bit ambiguous as the firm said just over a week ago: “the laptop will be ready within 20 days to sell to the market,” but added that it doesn’t yet have any distributors. Yesterday however, Ahmed Hamed from Jointech told us, "the samples are ready to dispatch….we’ve also started to sell". µ
Comments
Could be a handy mobile companion...
As it has a USB host, with the right software I guess it could do all that the Redfly does, but with a slightly smaller screen, less battery life, and be $400 cheaper. Bargain!Would be great to hook my Tytn II to it to browse the internet at far higher resolution.
XP not CE
Shurely shome mishtake? Thats surely XP on that screen, not CE. but the crap 64Mb wouldn't really run XP that well now would it ?specs are on the site
http://www.jointech.com.hk/products_JL7100.htmlAlso, a few more details about the proc
Q11. Which processor have been used in JPro JL7100?
Ans. Samsung S3C Chipset with ARM 9 Core.
Aesthetics
Inexpensive laptops are very nice. However the very wide plastic border around the LCD on many of them is extremely ugly. So ugly, as in this case, that I could not use the thing.Consider the HP 2133: it's not $99.00, rather about $400.00+/-, so maybe apples and oranges, but it is a good looking machine.
Sadly...
"Samsung 400MHz chipset."So it probably won't play WoW.
What's wrong with CE?
I'd like to know what the author thinks is so bad about the Windows CE operating system. I've seen it on friends' PDAs and it looks really nice, probably one of the better things to come out of Microsoft in the last few years.Will be a laptop soon!
It will be a laptop as soon as someone ditches the garbage software and installs Linux on it instead!If they can do it at that price,
it will make it onto Christmas lists and be a good seller.Can it run youtube, java and other web stuff ok? Can it run some games?
XP?
You could connect to a Windows PC from CE using a remote desktop connection product, but that depends on what your XP licence allows. Some versions specifically forbid the likes of VNC. But if it's XP Pro then a single-user terminal server is provided.Should I be getting the same captcha text for each post?? I read the story on that topic, have you given up?
Android?
Perhaps the first of ARM-based mini-laptops that will run Android? It'll be interesting to speculate on such an Android WiFi laptop in emerging markets which will have the Apple 3G iPhone ...