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M&S to sell Elonex netbooks

'I'll have a pack of spuds, three set of knickers and a PC'

Next time you shop for duck a l’orange in Marks & Spencer or buy briefs in Next, you might also take away an Elonex netbook.

Handbag-sized netbooks with 7in displays from the British PC maker will “soon go on sale” for £99 ($149/€109) in both retail chains, The Telegraph reports.

Nick Smith, chief executive of Elonex, said the sub-£100 price tag will put the netbooks on a par with smartphones. “Our netbooks are for people who want a better BlackBerry, with a proper screen and keypad,” he told The Telegraph. “If you lose it on a train or [in a] bar, you have only lost £100 worth of kit”.

Elonex is prepping an official announcement this week at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

Latest Comments

Defiantly be aware of quality

The Advent I bought from PCWorld (I know I know I should have known better) has an intermittent screen fault, but since their software test doesn't spot the hardware fault they won't fix it, refund me or replace it even though it's still under warranty.

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Great Price but what about Quality

This is a great advertising ploy but having seen and been involved in this market for many years I can say this will create a lot of hype and some great sales BUT you will see some of the highest levels of returns on this product.

Keep an eye on reviews before you buy on the quality!!!

Be aware of this, the technology on this netbook compared to other netbooks on the market will be very poor. You will spend ages loading web pages, encounter problems with many websites. Have lots of other technical issues etc.

As I said this is a great marketing ploy but just be careful, this could be the biggest flop I have seen a long time!

The mention of a UK based maker is again a marketing ploy as all these products will be made in China not the UK like some of the other PC products in made in the past.

Didnt Elonex have a netbook in Carphone Warehouse and then all of a sudden you hear Carphone warehouse no longer selling linux based netbooks and this was a much better model than this one will be?!?! A little warning I feel.....

Good luck.....

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@Colin Millar

Currently posting this on my One-t sitting in front of t'telly. :-)

Movies reduced to appropriate bitrates/resolution on my SD card at the moment:

Idiocracy - 122.6 MB

Office Space - 130.0 MB

Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging (for teen daughter) - 157.3 MB

So, you're looking at around 12-14 movies per 2GB card ? Not too shoddy in my book !

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If you lose it on a train

This isn't just a missing netbook. It'a an M & S missing netbook..

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Not a netbook

I'm sure it's a lovely bit of kit (and I've been mildly tempted ever since seeing Maplin selling them), but it's not x86-based, which means there just isn't the software availability for it that there is for "real" netbooks. ARM have the same problem with their attempts to get on the bandwagon - not that there haven't been non-x86 large-pda-with-keyboard devices for a long time, including the original Psion netbook. Essentially, a MIPS-based "netbook" is only slightly more compatible with x86 Linux software than a Windows Mobile-based phone is compatible with a Windows Vista laptop.

I wish journalists would make a point of distinguishing similar-looking bits of technology that are different in important ways. The Elonex and various ARM devices are cool kit with price and battery life on their side, but the public ought to know what they're getting; I suspect M&S are setting themselves up for a lot of tech support calls. Otherwise I have three touchscreen mobile phones and an n770 all of which I'm going to start describing as netbooks (and I'll go back to calling my mini-note a subnotebook, like my librettos).

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