HP Mini 1000 Vivienne Tam Edition netbook cloned

The HP Mini 1000 Vivienne Tam Edition netbook, one of the most expensive netbooks on the market when it was launched late last year costed somewhere around $700. HP had a simple reason for such high price:Red color and floral pattern on the lid of designer Vivienne Tam.

Although HP is no longer selling the Mini 1000 and the Vivienne Tam Edition, but you can get a cheap clone of it that is made by Qifang Electronics. The main differences lies in a 2.5 inch hard drive instead of a 1.8 inch HDD, and the clone costs about $300, or less than half the MSRP of the original.

Samsung unable to find netbook buyer for its 1.8-inch HDD

Samsung launched its huge 250GB 1.8-inch HDD in the month of July 2009, but it was unable to attract any buyers for it. It seems as if the market for 1.8-inch market is now dying. Samsung’s new 1.8-inch HDD offers reduced power consumption against all 1.8-inch and 2.5-inch hard disks and has improved shock protection.

Interestingly, all hard disk manufactures left the 1.8-inch hard disk market, but Samsung and Toshiba. Last year, Toshiba came up with 120GB, 240GB and 250GB 1.8-inch hard disks, but they did not receive a tremendous response from various laptop or netbook manufactures.

Clearly, gone are the days that netbooks are shrinking. Most of the netbook manufactures are now coming up with bigger and bigger netbooks. Due to the increased sizes of current netbooks, netbook manufactures are easily able to use the standard 2.5-inch hard disks instead of the smaller 1.8-inch ones and thus has reduced the demand by a lot.