X
Business

Would you buy Coby's 7-inch smartbook for $85?

I know netbooks have driven down the prices on laptops quite a bit, now spawning so-called smartbooks, but this may be a little too much. Bargain electronics manufacturer Coby has been a showing new portable this week at the CeBIT expo that will cost, according to Engadget, just $85.
Written by Sean Portnoy, Contributor

I know netbooks have driven down the prices on laptops quite a bit, now spawning so-called smartbooks, but this may be a little too much. Bargain electronics manufacturer Coby has been a showing new portable this week at the CeBIT expo that will cost, according to Engadget, just $85. Yes, you read that right.

How does Coby get the price so low on the NBPC722? For starters, the screen is just 7 inches, which places it squarely between most 10-inch netbooks and smaller MIDs. It also eschews an Intel Atom processor for a 624MHz Marvell PXA303 one, and provides a mere 2GB of flash-based storage. You also have to live with Windows CE rather than Windows XP or Windows 7 as your OS. But most importantly, it has built-in 802.11b/g (but not 802.11n) Wi-Fi for checking email and viewing Web pages.

Is this Coby portable cheap enough that you'd buy it to give it to your kids so they can surf the Internet without pestering you about using your own computer? Frankly, mine are persistent enough to make me think about it.

Editorial standards