At 11am on Friday the 12th, for just 5 hours, Expansys will be offering a range of goods at reduced prices. One of them is the OQO e2 which will be offered with Vista for a tasty discount.
OQO E2 with 1.5GHz, 1GB RAM, 60GB HDD, Vista Bus, Office (affiliate link)
price drop by £465 from £1229.99 to £764.99 inc VAT
OQO E2 wit 1.5GHz, 1GB RAM, 60GB HDD, Vista Ultimate (affiliate link)
price drop by £400 from £1099.99 to £699.99 inc VAT
Its a good chance to get hold of one of the pearls of the ultra mobile PC world. Its extremely well designed and with the 1.5Ghz processor, should keep most of your apps happy.
Our review is here. More info and specs available here.
Unfortunately OQOs are pretty unreliable. If you look on OQOtalk.com there is a survey, 42% of users have had to return them for repair, and 13% have returned them more than once. And there’s a separate survey on international repair times – 45 days plus is most common
My advice – steer well clear. There are much faster devices out there now anyway and the 03 with Atom has been out and about.
http://www.oqotalk.com/index.php/topic,676.0.html
Scoobie, that link has a poll of 55 counts? is that the poll for 42% of users having troubles?
Thats a bit light on numbers to give any reliable indication.
Agreed is light on numbers but try a search on RMA on that website. I’ve been watching it all year. Bottomline is they have more reliability issues than any other UMPC.
when i read oqo talk – rma issues seem to come up alot, when i go to micropc talk(sony ux “talk” website i don’t think i ever come across the topic.
just my observation.
I lock my OQO2’s speed to 400MHz, always, it still gets very hot during hot summer days. I can imagine those who run their OQO2 at 1.6GHz and use tablet (CPU/RAM eater) are simply asking for a ticket for repair.
The OQOManager, a utility installed by default, messes up lots of things other than providing, supposedly, a better user experience. I removed that garbage from my OQO, but most people don’t know how to handle it.
See my tips posted to oqotalk forum (including a mouse button emulator I programed for OQO2) to get a sense for what issues you’ll be facing with and how to tweak them. You can easily add a build-in 3G module.
For such low prices, it is good to get this fantastic toy.
Greetings:
How can OQO justify a drop of 465 and 400 pounds.
What do you tell the buyers who paid the full price?
I think there is an OQO 3 about to be unvieled.
Hopely it will be priced more reasonably.
Regards Robert
By this logic, no company could ever cut the price on any product ever. Is that really what you want? For no company ever to cut the price on their product?
[BTW, technically speaking, OQO isn’t dropping the price. At least for the 02, you can go to their website to buy it at their regular price. Expansys is cutting the price.]
What you tell the buyers who paid the full price are:
1. You bought it at what you considered a fair price. That hasn’t changed.
2. For the price you paid for it, you got to use it for all that time between when you bought it and now.
Basically, if you didn’t think the original price was a fair price for it, then you shouldn’t have bought it. If you did think the original price was a fair price, that it’s now cheaper doesn’t change that.
awesome discount…
i really hope that means an unveiling of the OQO 3 is imminent…if it’s priced competitively, i perhaps will go for one…let’s see..
:-)
There probably are a number of reasons why they dropped the price.
I think that it is too drastic to just be a new model. Maybe in 6 months after the new model, but not before.
I believe that it is very much the new and much cheaper competition that is now underscored by the Dell entry that they are adapting to. They have to recalibrate their business model for the new era. The old days of the newest machine just scooping the cream off the top are gone.
When the info about M528 was leaked out, I predicted that OQO would be in big trouble. I was right, even though most of the members of oqotalk did not agree with me. The M528 has everything OQO has and more, and is thinner, lighter and much cheaper. Apparently OQO has to dump all its stock before the XP driver is out for the M528.
A pocket PC with a thumb-keyboard is a fantastic toy for fun and some valuable tasks as long as it is cheap enough, because you still need something like the Everun Note or Fujitsu U2010 with a touch-type-able keyboard to be productive and/or a smartphone to be truly pocketable (OQO is still too heavy and large for you to put in your pocket all the time).
Just don’t expect a OQO2 to be your all-in-one device that’s all you need. If it is such an AIO, $2000 or whatever is worth it. Unfortunately it is not. For $2000, it can only be an expensive toy for rich executives. But, as a unique and useful gadget, it worths every penny of $700.
Well, the M528 has everything the OQO has except:
high capacity persistent storage
Windows XP/Vista right out of the box.
An incomplete, after the fact XP install hardly counts. Gigabyte doesn’t support this and it’s missing drivers. Moreover, Gigabyte doesn’t look like they’re making any moves to support XP. This will seriously limit the number of people who buy the M528 to use XP even if someone does develop the missing drivers.
In any case, it’s not OQO cutting the price. It’s Expansys. If it were OQO, you’d see this price cut all over the place. As near as I can tell, this is just limited to Expansys. (Expansys USA did do the same thing to the 02 last week.)
In any case, it’s impossible to divine the reason for the price cut simply from the cut itself. As a few people have speculated, perhaps an 03 is imminent. If that’s the case, the hypothetical 03 may look like a response to the M528, but OQO probably started work on it long before Gigabyte announced the M528.
[Also, what the folks at OQOTalk expect from the hypothetical 03 isn’t a direct competitor to the M528. They’re expecting something more powerful than the 800MHz Atom inside the M528. Just because two devices are the same size doesn’t mean they compete against each other.]
That should have been “new machine” not “newest machine.”
BEWARE
OQO is not discounting these, Expansys is. These are models that are over 1 year old and the batteries are dead.
Expansys is getting rid of old stock and sticking OQO with the warranty claims. If you buy/bought one consider yourself warned.
That really sounds like the sort of thing Expansys would do, Expansys are the other company I really don’t like, having been burned by them in the past
The discount is more than double the cost of a new extended battery
Is the HSDPA version going to be on special offer?
I was watching this offer as I have been looking to a buy an HSDPA-enabled e2 for some time. Since these aren’t the HSDPA versions I was put off, but the idea that Expansys may do a similar offer for the better models was appealing.
However it would seem that of the 51 on offer, Expansys sold exactly…. 2.
I have a feeling they’ll be back on offer soon enough as Expansys need to clear their stock – but Zip’s comments on the dead batteries and scoobies’ comments on the reliability of these machines should be heeded. All the research I’ve done seems to suggest a pretty high failure rate and very poor CS from OQO.
If you can find a HSDPA miniPCI module (such as from a Novatel USB modem), you can easily put it into OQO2.
be advised. expansys last Run for the USA, was a batch from 2007. The battery life of them sitting so long without being cycle has caused some to be 50% capacity or so. MANY are complaining about this
how many did they actually sell? 3? :-D
I hope I am wrong but with price drops like that either they have the 03 models ready to sell soon or maybe the company is ready to go bankrupt and that is why the CEO resigned this month?
I think they have great potential but they really need to make a model with a touch type keyboard that is a clamshell shape.