Brett Gideon: Doing it wrong and doing it right – ultraportable notebooks

My esteemed colleague Jeska Innes has posted her thoughts on Apple’s MacBook Air in her TONE blog and she’s spot on – Apple both missed the boat and dropped the ball with the Air. I won’t rehash all the Air’s problems because she’s done that admirably well (hell hath no fury like a Mac devotee scorned eh?) but I will say that if they dropped the price on the entry level Air, it would change the picture somewhat. With no solid state drive and a slow processor, $2,999 is way out of whack but a price drop to $1,999 would make it much more palatable (ignore the $5K+ of the solid state model, that’s just silly).

Enough of the wrong – Lenovo more or less has it right with their X300 ultraportable notebook. Make no bones about it, the X300 is a lightweight business laptop and it’s loaded to the gunwales with everything a corporate user needs. It was described as zero compromise at the launch and while the performance is average at best, it’s more than adequate for its purpose. The only major rub is the price (again) – starting at around $4,700 you have to pay to play. That’s nothing new though, being at the cutting edge carries a cost and as long as SSD (Solid State Drives) carry major price premiums, this type of ultraportable is going to bruise the company IT budget.

Roll on 256Gb flash drives because by the time that arrives, a 64Gb drive will be affordable and ultraportables will be something within most people’s reach.