small laptops and the US market

Michael Gartenberg | March 04, 2006, 07:34 PM

David Card points out that small laptops have never taken hold in the US market. There are reasons that these small computers (that I personally love) have failed to take the US by storm.

Small keyboards, unerpowered specs, high prices don't make for success in the US market where we pay a premium as consumers for BIG not small. Japan is totally the opposite. UI is also an issue. Try using XP on an OQO, it simply wasn't built for that type of screen,

IF indeed Origami is a small XP computer, it's going to have to solve a lot of these issues for it to succeed. Look how well Origami solves these issues to get a sense of whether this type of device can be a mass market item over time.

There's also a lot of speculation that Origami somehow is an attempt to be an iPOd killer. Nothing seen so far would indicate that this is something designed for that purpose. It's going to take a lot more than a computer running XP to even make a dent in the iPod at the moment.