Earlier this month, I posted a big chart comparing the lowest priced UMPCs. I promised to do individual comparisons and this is the first of those comparisons. I was inspired by last week by a great article about where Palm went wrong with the Foleo and I'd like to take this opportunity to go into a few details about how the VIA NanoBook stacks up against the Palm Foleo.
Full VIA NanoBook / Palm Foleo comparison after the jump.
The first thing to be noticed between these two devices is that they are very different in terms of size. The NanoBook sports a 7" screen, while the Foleo has a large 10.2" display. With the size difference comes a weight difference, the Foleo is about 30% heavier than the NanoBook. Couple the increased weight with the larger footprint and the Foleo starts to look a lot less like a ultra mobile solution and more like an ultra portable notebook.
The display on the Foleo will definitely be more readable with a higher resolution of 1024x600 and larger area. But you may find it hard to fill all that screen real estate because the Foleo only runs Linux. While I'm sure Palm's applications will run perfectly well on the Foleo and connectivity with your smartphone will be seamless, you won't be doing much else on it. The NanoBook on the other hand will run Windows and all the applications that you've become accustomed to using. And if you desire, you can load Linux on the NanoBook and take advantage of many of the new mobile applications being developed on that platform.
One of the shining points of the Foleo is that it does have instant-on, if you've watched Palm's video, it's quite impressive to see. I have heard that it only opens up to one application however, but I haven't had any confirmation of that yet. The Foleo uses SSD to store data which means lightning fast access, but with only 256MB of space you may find yourself running out of space, especially if you take many photos with your smartphone. The NanoBook's 30GB hard drive may seem slow by comparison, but you'll be able to store plenty of music, photos, and movies on it.
Finally we get down to the price, when you do go to the store to pick up your shiny new Foleo or NanoBook you'll be writing a check for $599.99 plus tax regardless of which one you pick up. The Foleo does come with a $100 mail-in rebate, so you may want to take that into consideration when considering the price. In the end, these are two ultra mobile devices with two very different purposes: the Foleo is a smartphone companion, while the NanoBook is a fully fledged computer.
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