Battle for cheap laptops

In the last six months, the market for cheap ultraportable laptops have been dominated by the Asus Eee PC. It was a great move by the Taiwan manufacturer and became an instant hit primarily because of the retail price. Before that, the smaller the laptop the pricier it becomes. The Asus Eee PC 4G was originally pegged at $199 but ended up being sold for Php19,000+ in the Philippines – yet people kept on buying them like hot cakes. This unit runs on an Intel Celeron 900MHz, has a 7-inch screen, 512 MB memory, and 4GB of storage but the built-in wifi, webcam as well as its light weight makes it a usable and affordable laptop. The market response to this new gadget may have prompted other manufacturers to join into the fray. There are dozens of new ultra mobile PCs (UMPC) coming out this year – from MSI to ECS, HP, Gigabyte and Astone. Intel even has a partnership with Neo to turn the Classmate PC commercially and call it Neo Explore X1. I looked at 4 sub-Php20k UMPCs and compare them side by side to see which one gets you the best bang for your buck. In the chart below, we have the Asus Eee PC 4G, the Neo Explore X1, Astone UMPC and Deep Blue H1. All four models mentioned above are currently available in the Philippines, has a 7-inch screen and costs under Php20,000. Take note though that they don’t come with an optical drive (CD/DVD) so you need to purchase it separately. We compare all aspects of the laptop – from the CPU to the on-board memory to the storage capacity, among others. A quick inspection of the specs among the four will give you an impression that it’s a toss-up between the Astone UMPC and the Deep Blue H1 with only a Php2,000 price difference between the two. If you fancy a touch screen and stylus, then Astone might be the choice for a couple thousand bucks more. It’s also lighter than the Deep Blue H1. The bet though would go on the side of the latter because it’s more affordable. If you still decide to go with the more popular Asus Eee PC, you might want to check out my earlier review about it here. As more and more players enter the market, they’ll offer better features and the prices go down further. And we all love healthy competition, don’t we? - Abe Olandres / YugaTech