Panasonic says Intel Atom not up to snuff for its PCs Japanese giant Panasonic has said no to netbooks: it's not going to make a Small, Cheap Computer. It's reasoning is that SCCs are consumer products and it's in the business of selling to, well, business. Clearly it doesn't - for the moment - believe executives and mobile workers want ultra-compact laptops. Given the battery …
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The mind boggles, really.
What sort of hardcore 'office applications' require such an excess of processing power that an intel atom can't provide? Sure, there's always going to be power-hungry apps that you might want on your workstation (compilation, place and route, image processing... a few things that spring to mind), but 'editting a word document' or 'editting a spreadsheet' should not even being to approach the same power requirements.
Quite frankly, I blame everyone. The people who've worked on MS office since v6, and anyone who has anything to do with acrobat for a start.
Yes - the comment about battery life phased me as well. My wife's EEEPC 901 seems to go on forever (something like 6 hours running XP).
The other thing that's disconcerting is how snappy it feels (about 25 seconds from a cold boot till you can start working). I guess that's because of the small install with less stuff running all the time, but the end result is a machine which feels strangely quick (and strangely quiet).
Mark
Strange, I get decent battery life from the extended battery on my Kohjinsha SC3. On the extended battery, yesterday I ran it for about 8 hours without plugging it in, switched and charged the standard battery overnight, and put the extended one back on, and it was telling me that there was about an hour of charge left. Most of the usage was pulling up documents from the web, e-mail, and taking minutes for a meeting in OpenOffice. My primitive calculations are that with my usage, the stock battery would last about 4 hours. (the stock battery is 2.6AH, the extended one is 5.2
I haven't bothered changing it from the Windows Vista Home Premium that it came with. As an added plus, I can actually type faster, and more comfortably on it's smaller keyboard.
Panasonic don't want netbooks because there is little margin for profit in them silly.
In any case businesses buying computers go on features as the major consideration, not price. The IT bod buying the product drools over features and price is done by someone else.
Panasonic can't do that with its own netbook can it?
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