Apricot announces netbook – Acorn-mini & BBC-wind expected to follow

I feel like Marty McFly staggering around Hill Valley square looking for a newspaper. I can’t see any velcro trainers, no odd luminous towelling socks but out of absolutely nowhere, Apricot Computers has launched a new netbook.

It’s called the Apricot PicoBook Pro and like all good sub-notebooks, it’s got a 8.9″ screen, it weighs less than 1kg – 980g to be precise – and it seems to have the obligatory four-hour battery life too.

Sadly no solid state business but a perfectly operable 60GB HDD, two USB ports, it does have Bluetooth and it even supports WiMax too. It’s nice and cheap at £279 and you do get the option of either an XP or Linux version for the brave.

Dimension-wise, you’re looking at 230mm x 171mm x 38.7mm and somewhere on that casing is included a 4-in-1 card reader and a 1.3-megapixel webcam. In fact, aside the lack of SSD, there’s very little to whinge about which is a shame because I fancied a good whinge. Ah, hang on. No Atom chip. There, that’s something.

The screen gives you a wide VGA resolution of 1024 x 600 and, if you’d rather display your desktop elsewhere, there is a VGA port too.

It all rather makes you wonder what the first exponents of the all-in-one with 3.5″ floppy drive has been up to for the last 20 years. Then you have a read and it’s actually rather dull.

Perhaps, there’s just only room for one fruit in computing. Does this mean the demise of Apple?

Apricot

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