Discount supermarket offers not-so-cheap netbook
How much?
Top marks to supermarket chain Lidl for missing the 'cheap' in 'Small, Cheap Computer'. It wants a whopping £390 for a bog-standard 10in netbook.
The irony is that Lidl is a discount chain and was apparently given Which?'s Best Value for Money Retailer award this year.
The Targa Netbook Traveller 1016 that Lidl wants the best part of four hundred notes for packs a typical SCC spec: 1.6GHz Intel Atom, 1GB of DDR 2 memory, 1.3-megapixel webcam, three USB ports etc.
It has a 160GB hard drive, which is above par, and 802.11n Wi-Fi rather than the more commonplace 802.11b/g, but nothing else in the hardware to justify the premium - you can buy a largely comparable Advent 4211 for £270 online. Go for an netbook with an 8.9in screen and a small solid-state drive and you get one for half the price of the Traveller.
Here's the reason: according to Lidl's website, the Traveller comes with "Genuine Microsoft Windows Vista Home Edition". Vista on a 1024 x 600 10in display, anyone?
Lidl warns that the Traveller 1016 is available at £390 "only while stocks last". Would anyone care to forecast how big the rush will be for this 'bargain'?
Thanks to reader Thomas for the tips.
More 10in Netbooks...
MSI Wind |
Asus Eee PC S101 |
Advent 4213 |
Asus Eee PC 1000 |
COMMENTS
I thought...
that the whole point of SCC was that they were Small (10" is bordering on notebook sizes) and cheap (£390 ain't cheap, Spend an extra £7.32 and you could have a Toshiba Satellite Pro A300-1OQ Pentium Dual Core T3200 with 120GB HDD 1GB RAM, 15.4" TFT, DVD±RW and Vista Business delivered to your door) Things went wrong the minute that SCC went above the £250 price point. Vista on a netbook? he Atom seems barely powerful enough to run Linux let alone XP. I suppose this is what happens when the beast from Redmond decides it wants a slice of (more like the whole) pie.
They are indeed in ongoing possession of a giraffe ...
... but also include (wait for it!) Corel Office and other assorted commercial tat, which even on the dodgy "OEM" sites seems to cost a few squid. But that and Vista would probably account for the price premium over a sensible installation of Linux/OpenOffice.
What's the chances of getting refunds under the EULA, driving down to a vaguely sane price for what's probably not too horrendous a bit of hardware?
