Kogan are offering a 11.6 inch screen laptop with 30GB of solid state
memory. Apart from the low price (under $400) the feature of note is
that it comes with Google's Chromium Operating System:
<http://www.kogan.com.au/shop/agora-12-ultra-portable-laptop-chromium-os>.
This has prompted news items such as "Aussies First to Get Chromebook
Laptops" (Melanie Pinola, PCWorld, Jun 3, 2011 1:30 PM):
<http://www.pcworld.com/article/229370/aussies_first_to_get_chromebook_laptops.html>.
Kogan seems to have a gift for getting free publicity. This is a better
headline than: "Generic Chinese Laptop With Free OS to Avoid Paying
Microsoft". ;-)
I have ordered the Kogan Agora Pro laptop, which appears to be the same
unit, but with more RAM, a hard disk and Ubuntu, for about $50 extra:
<http://blog.tomw.net.au/2011/04/agora-12-ultra-portable-laptop-computer.html>.
Previously I bought the Kogan Agora 10" Netbook, which has worked fine,
but the screen and keyboard are just a bit too small:
<http://blog.tomw.net.au/2009/08/kogan-agora-netbook-pro-mostly-good.html>.
I do some teaching and there has been much discussion in the last year
about Apple iPads for students. But the average student would not be
able to get by with just a tablet computer. They would still need a
physical keyboard and a bigger screen for the wordy assignments they
still have to do. They could have an external keyboard and monitor for a
tablet computer, but that adds to the cost and complexity. A laptop with
a 11.6" screen will display about the area of a printed A4 page, has a
reasonable size keyboard and should still fit in a bag designed for A4
pads. This seems a good compromise.
The Moodle open source learning management system I use for teaching
should work fine with Chromium OS, as it just needs a web browser for
the interface.
ps: A4 size pads are popular, because they are about the largest size
which can be easily held in two hands. In a similar way, smart phone
screens about about the size of a credit card are popular. This has
nothing to do with electronics, but depends on the size of the human hand.
--
Tom Worthington FACS CP HLM, TomW Communications Pty Ltd. t: 0419496150
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617, Australia http://www.tomw.net.au
Adjunct Senior Lecturer, School of Computer Science, The
Australian National University http://cs.anu.edu.au/courses/COMP7310/
Visiting Scientist, CSIRO ICT Centre: http://bit.ly/csiro_ict_canberra
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