Read more.Priced at £89.99, a functional replacement for existing smart covers?
Read more.Priced at £89.99, a functional replacement for existing smart covers?
...or just buy a netbook?
For the cost of an iPad 3 + £90 keyboard, you could get something a bit better than the average netbook - something in an 11.6" or 13.3" with low-voltage iX - and Trinity's ULV versions should be making their way into small/slim notebooks too. There are (IMNSHO, of course) far better ways to spend that kind of money on computing purchases...
I would like to disagree with you on this point - I have deployed to date 768 netbooks to our students and staff, they have ample power to run all of our applications - CS4/Serif/Office2010/AppV/SIMS ect... and fully integrate into our domain for logins/printer deployment/GPO's/Shared Areas. The only thing missing is a touch-screen (but then who wants to edit a picture with finger prints all over your screen!) just my opinion of course
Hmm, I would disagree with this =P From my experience netbooks are too slow to perform all but basic admin tasks and with CS4 etc the performance for certain tasks can be slow and the screen resolution is impractically low with poor colour reproduction, though naturally the use of Windows is good on Small-Medium server deployment. I think Ultrabooks and Ultrathins are the future, a no compromise solution, compact, lightweight, reasonably priced (some are and more in the future) powerful core i or trinity CPUs, ample memory, screen resolutions starting at 768p moving up whilst remaining in an 11 - 13" form factor, more substantial graphics cores (with GPGPU compute playing an increasing role in acceleration for many apps). Once Windows 8 hits, we'll likely see a friendlier experience for the small form factors and possibly some touch screens, though I agree, without the form factor of a tablet can be pretty pointless in my experience.
You may have deployed 768, but have you actually used one for anything for any period of time? Maybe they've got better in the last year or so since I last used one, but I found them to be basically unbearable with Windows 7 installed. They're ok with Linux on them.
My phone has a more enjoyable internet experience than an equivalent aged netbook, and my Android Tablet absolutely eclipses them in terms of usability for basic stuff like email/browsing/media. I suspect if I tried a netbook with flash-based storage I'd probably hate it less, as I think it's the crappy hard disks that are the main bottleneck on all that I've tried.
It depends on which netbook you go for though.
Take Acer as an example. If it's an old Aspire One with the atrocious 8GB SSD and 512MB RAM, then it's horrifically slow. But the Ferrari Aspire One with a 250GB hard drive and 2GB RAM are fine (except for the horribly garish styling, but kids like that). Our Lenovo S205s I find the same - 4GB RAM, tidy, small netbook that are perfectly fine.
The CPUs are weak compared to a full-fat ultrabook, obviously, but the CPU isn't often the bottleneck in Windows. Invariably the weak link in cheap netbooks is the hard drive and RAM. Spec decent ones and they're perfectly fine.
£89.99 for a keyboard.... Jokes on anyone buying this....
Oh wait...its for people with more sense than money clearly.
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