At IFA in Berlin this week I had a chance to talk to host Nicole Scott about low-cost notebooks. We’ve been podcasting together for years so it was a relaxed 30 minutes where we covered a lot of ground. We talk about the ASUS EeeBook X205, the $200 Windows notebook launched at IFA, and we cover Chromebooks as an alternative. What are the problems? Who’s buying them? Like many people I’m sitting on the fence right now and assessing both Windows (see my other site, UMPCPortal) and Chromebooks and waiting to see what happens when Google offer the first ported Android applications.
well, chippy you said it – actually chromebooks are bought by the institutions directly, in masses and thereafter given to the user – the student. this said, they are property of the institution, not the the user.
whereas these “back to school” windows devices are bought by their individual users. for me this clearly represents the difference of theses 2 classes of devices. chromebooks are used as neatly controllable remote workstations in a affordable way. for institutions and their administration a killer factor. in contrast to this the individual user for his personal productivity goes for most flexible platform which still is a windows device these days. this seems to be quite reasonable to me.