my Technology Blog Follow @rhatol

Ah, those cute Apple white colored Notebooks?

No.

WhiteBooks are DIY notebook PCs (also called 'unbranded notebooks' or generic laptops)

Do you see all those major notebook/PC vendors coming up w/ their build-your-own or build-to-order your own laptop? Like Neo, PCX X-Mobile, MSI, ECS, etc....They are customizing/reselling whitebooks and putting their name on it. (of course with aditional value-added services like warranty, support, etc)

Just like the PC industry before, where you're tied-in on those branded units....now, you can customize every component on your PC. And this will be the future of laptops. No doubt about it.

I can see Intel & Seagate spearheading these technology.

The latest platform for these whitebooks is Intel Sonoma w/c comprises the new Dothan Pentium-M (w/ as much as 2MB on-chip memory), new Intel 915 chipset w/ FSB of 533Mhz (whoa!), PCI-E, DDR2, wireless 802.11a/b/g, as well as new audio/video technology enhancements.

But right now, the only thing configurable in what you can get your hands on whitebooks today are the Hard Disk Drive, CD Drive, Memory, WLAN.

The barebone kits that you can buy from ODM (Original Design Manufacturers) includes the chasis, battery/charger, keyboard, pointing device, screen and CPU and mainboard chipset. The chipset w/c in turn includes video, audio, IO ports, card slots, indicators, etc.

Just to name a few, top ODMs are Quanta (HP,iBook,IBM), Compal, Wistron (Dell), Arima (Compaq), Inventec.

So before buying those branded (expensive) notebooks, consider taking a look on what current whitebooks has to offer.

cheers,



[tidbits]
DOS is dead, right?

Well, the MS-DOS successor is the Monad shell or MSH. Did I already mention that it's a part of Longhorn?