The 1980s Netbook

Davey Winder
Saturday, 18 October 2008 19:22

Your IT - Home IT

Think bad hair and worse fashion. Think IBM Compatible Personal Computers. Think British. Yes, the eighties are back as Apricot Computers is reborn with the launch of, you guessed it, a Netbook.

Starting life way back in 1965 as Applied Computer Techniques, ACT changed name to Apricot Computers in the eighties during which time they became one of the best known computing brands in the UK.

Along the way Apricot picked up a few notable milestones, such as beating Apple with the first commercial shipment of an all-in-one system featuring a 3.5" floppy.

However, unless you are of a certain age or include 'history of computing' amongst your interests the chances are you will not have heard of them. Not least because the company and the brand finally died back in 1999.

But now, like a Phoenix rising from the ashes, Apricot is back under new ownership and has repositioned itself as a manufacturer of "ultra mobile personal computers" or Netbooks to you and me.

Unfortunately, times have changed and it looks unlikely that Apricot will be quite such an innovator now as it was twenty five years ago. Instead, it has jumped squarely on the Netbook bandwagon rolling out the Apricot Picobook Pro.

It's not that there is anything wrong with the Picobook Pro, but rather that it has launched at a time when everyone else has a 8.9 inch screened Netbook already in the market. As such it is hard to get excited about.

Everything appears average, from the 1024x600 display, to the 60GB hard drive and 1GB of RAM. Yes, there is integrated Bluetooth and WiFi, but most everyone else has that, as they do the 1.3 megapixel webcam.

Even the four hour battery claim is average, along with the UKP 279 price tag for the Suse Linux version and UKP 329 for the Windows XP one.

I'd love to make some wonderful fruity analogy about how the launch of the Picobook Pro is as refreshing as a juicy peach, but to be honest it excites me about as much as an over-ripened banana...