Steve Paine is at the IDF and has confirmed that the long-in-the-tooth OQO is getting the Atom processor. He also states that the rest of the hardware will stay the same, the only change will be switching to the Atom processor. It will be interesting to see what this does to the pricing of the OQO and it certainly (finally) confirms its status as a UMPC.
Oh thank goodness, the QQQ is one of my favorite UMPCs and the cruddy Via C7 processor killed it for me.
Now to put the processor in the HP MiniNote also a great computer paired with the horrid C7 processor!
my guess is it wont change the pricing 1 bit, OQO is the type of company that will sell a product as much as the market will allow for as long as possible … all other factors come second.
I seriously doubt the price will change, considering the starting price for the base model is $1299. OQO has always been expensive. You cannot pitch that against a $499 mininote, especially when the two are aimed at different users and have a different feature set.
It may be long in the tooth but it’s still the best device of its kind out there and this can only make it better.
Since I’ve purchased the ideal 2 devices (for me) I study all the new ones coming out and none of them make my credit card cringe in fear (which is fortunate because real life is sucking up all my money). :)
Dennis Moore, OQO’s CEO stressed in a long post at OQOTalk that this is a “technology showcase, not an impending product announcement.” It’s kind of funny then that everyone is treating it as if it were an impending product announcement.
His post:
http://www.oqotalk.com/index.php/topic,2922.msg22889.html#msg22889
It may be that they’ll eventually announce an Atom-based product. However, I see a lot of jumping to conclusions and counting of unhatched chickens. Dennis Moore called it a prototype. If they should choose to develop this into a full-fledged product, there’s nothing to stop them from making other changes in the process. Unless someone has gotten a statement from an OQO official, I don’t think we can just assume that they will release a device which is the current Model 02 except with an Intel Atom.
This device actually raises more questions about OQO’s future plans than it answers.