Cloudbook Beta Delay
It’s fairly common knowledge now that the Everex Cloudbook UMPC was delayed. The announcement came by way of a Computerworld article published the day of the scheduled release of the mini laptop. Much to everyone’s displeasure, there were two reasons given in that article that contributed to the delay of the release:
- Paul Kim, director of marketing at Everex, stated that “a couple of last-minute software tweaks” prevented them from releasing the product to the public.
- Another alleged email from someone else at Everex stated that the delay was also due in part to the Chinese/Taiwanese new year celebrations going on, and that most employees take off time from work to celebrate…implying a slowdown in production.
Various other blogs have speculated on hardware or driver issues. I tend to disagree with the hardware issue theory. This hardware already exists as the Packard Bell Easynote XS in Europe. It’s been out for a while already. In fact, Everex was showing off a “Cloudbook” at CES, which actually ended up being just a Easynote with an Everex label on it, and gOS Rocket 2.0 Beta. Packard Bell should already have worked out any hardware issues with the device. Everex shouldn’t have any excuses in the hardware arena. Which leads us to my theory….software issues.
SO, here’s the deal. We all know this UMPC is going to feature a fancy new OS created by 22-year old David Liu. An Ubuntu-based, Enlightenment-powered slim Linux distro that has a lot of Google and Web 2.0 flair to it. The original version of this OS (1.0.1) was released on November 1st, 2007 and came preinstalled on Everex Green PC’s sold at Walmart. That release has gained a lot of popularity in the low-cost desktop and laptop PC market, and you can now find it on many budget PC’s being sold all over.
On January 7th 2008 at CES, Good OS released a beta version of the next installment of the gOS distro. This one was dubbed “Rocket” and features some nice improvements to the interface, apps, and Google Gears which is supposed to allow some of Google’s application’s to function in an offline or synced state. We’ve already seen in pictures taken at CES this year and pictures of the Cloudbook on Everex’s website that show they fully intend to have Rocket on the Cloudbook (spec sheet even lists it). But, I highly doubt they’re going to release a beta version of an OS on the Cloudbook. The negative publicity alone on that would be highly-damaging even though the OS would for the most part probably run just fine.
So here’s MY theory. I think that David Liu and his team are running behind on squashing bugs with the latest release of gOS. The fact that their front page of the gOS website and all download sections still show that the OS is obviously not yet out of beta is enough of a reason for any company to delay releasing a product in my opinion. In addition to that, a lot of the news stories out there indicate that Everex is trying to customize the interface of the OS to work well on the Cloudbook’s 800×480 display size, and be as easy to use as Asus’s customized Xandros install is.
Combine that with the fact that gOS is supposed to include a new webcam application called gBooth, intended to work with Facebook. The Cloudbook comes with an integrated webcam, so I’m guessing that some drivers will need to be written to work with the device.
I’m sure there’s a whole list of other gOS-related items that have to be ironed out to work on the Cloudbook, but most of my theory on the reason for the delay revolves around the OS itself not being ready for release.
Ultimately, the part of all this that is most annoying for some people is the fact that a good portion of Cloudbook customers may not even use the factory supplied OS at all. Many people will probably wipe out the hard drive, and install a fresh copy of Windows XP on it. So all of this extra effort and delay is unnecessary for some customers. Everex could ship a “vanilla” Cloudbook now with nothing on it, and allow the customer to decide what OS they’d like to run; skip all the hassle of the delays and disappointed customers. I myself actually may fall into that group of people. (I haven’t yet decided if I like gOS yet. My testing in VM’s I’ve installed it in leaves me with somewhat of a “meh” response to the OS. )
So where does this leave us…well, waiting for another month for Everex to get the product out. If this delay is truly due to some OS-specific issues, I think they should still be manufacturing the hardware. I don’t know how they image the drives with the OS, but if they can be imaged after-the-fact, by all means production should not be slowed down on manufacturing the hardware. If Everex wants to compete with Asus in the US, they need to be pumping these things out of the factory as fast as they can. The Asus 2/4G’s have made their way into the US fairly well, but the 8G’s are still hard to find. One thing the Cloudbook has over the Eee is a lot more local storage. If they can grab the US market for people that want a UMPC with a decent amount of local storage, then Asus doesn’t stand a chance with their 8G’s.
Let’s hope that the issues with the Cloudbook are cleaned up quickly and the OS is as spiffy as they claim their trying to make it. I canceled my order for my Asus Eee 8G in black so I could get the Cloudbook right away. But this delay has left a bad taste in my mouth now. I’m on a pre-order list with ZaReason, so I should get one from the first batch of devices received. But sounds like that won’t be for quite a while.
Posted in News, Technology | 
February 7th, 2008 at 7:00 am
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