News Bits: Asus XG Station Details, Intel Pupil Device Laptop in UK, Best Buy Deceiving Customers

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More Asus XG Station details emerge

Asus announced its external graphics solution for notebooks, the XG Station, at the Consumer Electronics Show earlier in the year. It will not be available at retail, but rather shipped to OEMs and channel partners. It will be built using Asus PCI-express video cards and will not be sold as an enclosure. The prices will depend on the included graphics card.

The XG Station connects to a notebook via the ExpressCard slot. It features enhanced audio and video features. Its large LED display can display the following:

• System volume
• GPU clock speed
• GPU temperature
• Dolby Headphone status
• Current FPS (Frames Per Second) reading
• GPU fan speed monitor

Overclocking is possible through the XG Station; a control knob can increase the GPU core clock speed but not the memory.

Availability of the XG Station is expected next month. Pricing is unknown but it should be slightly more than the bundled graphics card itself.

Read More (DailyTech)

Intel to release &quot;Pupil Device&quot; laptop in UK

According to the UK newspaper the Telegraph, Intel is working to launch a playground-proof laptop targeted at kids between the ages of 7-18 in the UK. The laptop will likely be launched in September, during the back to school period, and will have an estimated retail price of around £500. The laptop will be semi-rugged for the typical rough treatment kids would give it, and it will have some sort of cloth covered lid with a school badge that would supposedly deter theft.

There's no word on which manufacturer would be producing this laptop or which operating system it would run.

Read More (Telegraph)

Samsung introduces its first Windows Vista UMPC

Samsung today introduced its newest Ultra-Mobile PC (UMPC), the Q1P, which is Samsung's first UMPC to quality for Windows Vista certification.

Specifications of the Q1P include a 1.0GHz Pentium processor, 60GB of hard drive space, 1GB of RAM, and a 7-inch touch-screen display. Battery life is about 2.5 hours, and the total weight is 1.7 lb. The Q1P with Windows Vista is available now for an MSRP of $1,299.

Read More (Business Wire)

Best Buy deceives customers via internal website

Best Buy has confirmed that its stores run a secret, employee-only intranet site via a report in The Hartford Courant. The intranet site is identical to Best Buy's public Internet site, but the prices are different. It is supposed to discourage customers from buying products advertised at cheaper prices on BestBuy.com.

The strategy foils attempts by customers to price match items from the Best Buy online website, which displays higher prices for the same items. Last February, Best Buy denied the existence of such a website. Last Wednesday, Best Buy confirmed it existed but did not back its intent and purpose with solid reasoning.

The bottom line is that Best Buy has been intentionally deceiving customers via use of the intranet website, making those believe the prices on the site are the actual prices.

Forum Discussion

Read More (DailyTech)

AMD says it wll miss Q1 sales target

AMD does not expect to meet its Q1 revenue target of between $1.6 and $1.7 billion. CEO of AMD Hector Ruiz will explain the miss at a financial analyst conference. AMD announced the changed sales forecast but provided minimal details on the cause of it. AMD has been feeling pricing pressure lately as Intel has started to chew away at AMD's server and desktop processor sales. AMD shares fell from $40 to $14 over the last year.

Read More (RegHardware)

 

It will be nice to see Best Buy get hurt badly by the courts...

They have tried to do this to me in 3 separate stores.

The first time I knew what the price was (checked 15 mins prior at home) and argued about it. One of the Geek Squad guys said "I think I know what you're talking about..." and told me of the intranet site. He'd figured it out, but didn't know what was really going on.

One memorable time I showed another store the print out of the online deal, demanded to use a computer connected to the real internet, and threatened the sales rep (and the manager that came by to deal with the looming PR disaster one time) that I'd just walk out and make a big deal of it if they didn't give me the advertised deal.

I was also nice about it, but the look on that manager's face when he had his company PC and the online PC side-by-side with two different prices on the same item...he was clueless to the scam. I will never forget the look on that guys face...

Promptly apologized, gave me the item at the lower price, and did an additional % off as a 'sorry.'

 

Best thing to do is print it out at home and take the price compare in. They'll obviously stop doing this now that it has been exposed.

That XG Station is definitely exciting, I'm curious as to why Asus isn't going to brand that themselves and release it. I really wonder who's going to badge and resell that.

 

I want an XG Station, like yesterday. I'll take it with an R1F, thank you... If the price is only $300, its a definite add on for me.

Best Buys special intranet website is rather shocking. I dont use Best Buy unless its for a specific item in the newspaper adds ($70 250GB external HDD, no MIRs), so it hasnt affected me, but thats a shocking hit on BBs credibility.

 

Man, that's bad news about Best Buy. I can't say I really like the one in my town to begin with though.

The Asus XG sure is an exciting new product.

 

The Asus thing sounds great. I'd love to see what traveling down this path has in store for the future. Sure, it's big and bulky and annoying now, but a few years from now perhaps you'll just plug in a portable graphics solution to your system when you need more power. The possibilities are great!

Intel...sounds expensive. I don't think badges will deter theft; low specs will...maybe. Students at the grade-school levels of education need better integration of the hardware with the teaching environment. Computers are a great tool when you're actually getting work done and not fiddling with things or getting stuck on weird system messages.

I wouldn't be so sure about that. Although Best Buy is being very aggressive and dubious to its customers, as a former Sears employee I know just how stupid and ignorant companies are to their customers when they set up a situation where the stores compete with their own website. I can't even begin to tell you the number of times people would find a lower price at sears.com while the in-store price was much higher OR be able to order something from sears.com and get it faster than the store could EVEN IF IT WAS TO BE PICKED UP AT THE SAME STORE! @_@ The online site would always be equal or better to what we store employees could do and we weren't supposed to price match "internet offers" even from our own company website. I got in trouble so many times for doing this, but since I was one of the last commission sales people in the state at the time I obviously didn't give a **** because I wanted to get paid. =P Best Buy certainly has put a ton of money and effort behind deceiving their customers and I think they should face legal action for it. It's one thing to wiggle your way out of price matching when your stores compete against your web site, but it's another to outright lie about your prices. I don't see how any manager could not figure out that "normal people" will pick up on this scam. Alas, I left Sears a couple years ago after not cramming warranty plans down peoples' throats so maybe they've changed (I doubt it), but some management groups leading certain companies have only gotten worse.

 

That Asus XG is really neat. While it has been talked about here at NBR for a while, it has a kind of niche-appeal that probably doesn't warrant decent retail sales for Asus. Still, like you say Andrew, it's going to be interesting to see who gets the rights over reselling the XG.

 

I think small notebooks just got alot more customers because of the asus XG Station.

 

I actually knew somewhat about this. I was asking one of the sales guys in the fall and I forget but for some reason he was looking at the online web site. he told me that "the online web site is covered by another company and is seperate from the store prices."

 

If only Asus XG station works on laptop LCD, it would be a great product.

I do like the Dolby Headphone. Is the Asus XG the first product for PC with Dolby Headphone? I don't remember seeing creative having it.


I also got screw by the Internal website from BestBuy. I was buying a game for a friends birthday listed as 29.99 on the "Internet". I print out the ad from their website, went to BestBuy only to find out their "Internal" website shows up as 39.99. I was kinda piss at that moment, but I needed the present so I got it anyway.

I thought I was getting a somewhat good deal since the game original price was 59.99.

I'm not surprise BestBuy is doing stuff like this since all big corporation is EVIL!

 

Still looking for details on the xg station like the price and what it does.

 

Hmmmmm, reseller only for the XG Station is quite puzzling. They could have their 'name' out there if they released it under their name. I wonder what their plan is...

 

-=Makes an obscene gesture towards Best Buy Corporate=-

This pisses me off so much. Best Buy has made millions of this scam for sure. I have no hard feelings for the employees of Best Buy because they are just doing there job. However corporate really screwed over a lot of people. I hope they get sued big time.
Tim

 

Oh man, the best buy logo should stand for best scam. This is so low that I would expect heads of top managment to start rolling. If suposedly "respectful" retail such as BB did that, I seriosly doubt if they ever had a legit buisness model.

 

The UK child school laptop thing is quite frankly a stupid project by Intel. I dont understand why children would need to use a laptop in a playground, and why children of 7 need a laptop at all for work Surely laptops aren't going to replace books in primary education

The XG is very cool. On Asus' website, they say an Asus 7900 with the XG is 9 times faster than the PC using a GMA 950, but is the Express Card interface really fast enough? It may have problems keeping up the PCIe Interface inside the XG.

 

Regarding the XG Station price, someone at the dailytech comments section pointed to this:

http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,128401/article.html

from January 7th, 2007

 

I think the xg station should be sold separately as well, without a bundled GPU.

 

Indeed, although it sounds like so far ASUS doesn't have any plans on selling it like that. Maybe sometime in the future though?

 

But that $600 price quote is from 2 months back....II've heard more recently from mastha212 that it would be closer to the price of the card itself, more like 300 or 400 dollars.

 

Yeah, that's why I made a point to highlight that the date of the article was early January. Definitely makes sense that they would have a better sense of pricing the closer it gets to release.

 

So will it be compatible with every laptop using the express card? That would so cool