Slim Linux laptop has potential (LinuxDevices)

Slim Linux laptop has potential (LinuxDevices)

Posted Jul 16, 2007 21:43 UTC (Mon) by Cato (subscriber, #7643)
Parent article: Slim Linux laptop has potential (LinuxDevices)

I think the article is right - Palm needs to focus on displacing standard laptops for many business trips, and on the user experience of instant on, easy application access, consistently quick operation, no viruses, no spyware, no antivirus, easy automated security updates (could be tricky - they do need mechanism for these) and so on.

Having wasted 6-8 hours on maintenance/fixing of two Windows PCs in the last 2 days, one of them a business laptop, I can really, really appreciate the virtues of an appliance like model for getting work done. Windows is just too complex and unreliable (today it wouldn't even finish booting until I'd removed a redundant firewall component installed by a VPN client... on Saturday it was consuming huge amounts of CPU in Firefox and IE for very simple web pages.... etc). Time to reset and start again with a clean appliance based model.

The one wildcard is whether Palm knows how to market this. Calling it a mobile companion is good in some ways, but a mistake in others - they need to focus more on its independent laptop nature, but focus on it being a 'laptop appliance' that just gets the job done, weighs less, has better battery life, etc. "Laptops for people who don't have time to faff around with Windows" maybe... Another domain for it is as the coffee-table laptop that almost never needs charging and is easily picked up to check something on the web or get email.

One interesting thing is that even though I like Linux a lot, I didn't mention Linux at all in the above. That part of Palm's marketing is exactly right, as the main target for this neither knows or cares that it runs Linux (just as they don't care that their TV is Linux based), though it also needs to ensure the machine is fully hackable and extensible so that the Linux developer community take it up and add features/fixes.

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