Cloud OS netbook turns up in Blighty
Jolicloud Jolibook not jolicheap, alas
The Jolicloud Jolibook has gone on sale in the UK, kind of.
The £280 netbook pre-loaded with the cloud-centric, Ubuntu-based operating system is now being listed by Amazon, but with a 1-3 month shipping window.
That's not what you'd expect to see with an 'available now' product.
The product is also listed by a vendor called Vye, which is own by distributor Micro Peripherals. The latter doesn't list the Jolibook, and while Vye is taking orders, it's not saying up front when the gadget will ship.
Neither Vye not Micro P have yet responded to our requests for clarification of the Jolibook's availability, but we'll update the story should we hear back from either operation.
Amazon and Vye both reveal the Jolibook spec as a bog-standard 300 quid netbook circa late 2010: 1.5GHz dual-core Intel Atom N550 CPU, 1GB of memory, 250GB hard drive, Intel integrated graphics, 10.1in screen and so on. Surely a cloud computer only needs a wee bit of local Flash storage? ®
COMMENTS
Sigh
I expect this sort of epic fail from entrenched players in the IT industry but then to have a newcomer come along and produce Just Another Craptastic Netbook (albeit sans the Windows Tax) it is truly disheartening.
These people had the opportunity to come into the market with zero baggage and offer up something different. A low cost, ARM + Flash based device might have been quite interesting, and if cheap enough would probably have flown off the shelves.
Instead, what do they do? They release a "me too", not cheap, not interesting, run of the mill Netbook whose only differentiator is that you don't have to pay for Windows.
Not that that seems to be reflected in the ticket price mind you.
PS. What is with all the 503 errors emanating from the Vulture Central servers today? Is the Amstrad you have running in the closet overheating perhaps? Maybe somebody could open the door a touch and let some air in for the poor dear.
@ Gareth Beverley
Very very obviously. The bezel is completely wrong thanks to a small amount of pincushioning in the original photo (look especially at the left edge).
In addition, I find it interesting that the picture is *identical* in the top photograph. I have three LCD laptops and I've just done a brief test with the El Reg index page. From that angle, *all* of the screens are darker, the machine I'm typing this on (eeePC 901) also tinted slightly reddish-brown, so I find it hard to imagine that looking at the screen from an angle would give the *exact* same shade of grey.
Which leads me to wonder why, exactly, they did such a crappy Photochop job... Announcement and sale before a working product is ready?
Starts in seconds arrives in months
Its quite a cloudy start to this one.
photochop?
is it just me or does the 2nd photo down (the front on one) look like the screen layout has been photochopped? the cropping looks off in the bottom right corner.
G
What you mean?
I'm sure on all our desktops Space Invaders is one of the top-14 productivity apps.
Why 14 per screen you ask? Because 16 would be weird!
