Litl Webbook Banks On Cute, Overlooks Practical

12:34AM November 5, 2009 | Mark Wilson

How did Asus, Acer and all the other netbook manufacturers miss such an obvious ploy? The word “Litl Webbook” must be the most cutely named gadget since the “Chumby”. And it’s also an interesting product in its own right.

But I did say “interesting”, not “buyable”.

The Litl Webbook is a 12-inch netbook that can flip from laptop to easel, making it ever so more aesthetically pleasing while watching movies or displaying photos. Extra design touches like a nob and optional remote smooth the transition from laptop to artsy laptop, but the Litl Webbook is not a tablet — it lacks those last few degrees of flexibility, plus there’s no touchscreen.

As for the hardware specs, it’s a typical 1.6GHz Atom, 1GB RAM and… wait… just 2GB of flash storage? Yes. The Webbook wants to be a cloud computing machine that runs widgets (on top of Linux, we assume) instead of a full OS. So you’re supposed to store all of your precious files somewhere else and rely on the service’s automatic software updates.

The idea is all right, but not for $US700. At that price, you’re in full-out capacitive multitouch laptop territory.

And you know what? Double-checking my spelling on “Litl Webbook” has gotten super annoying by this point, too. Drop the price by $US300, hook a guy up with some extra vowels, and then we’ll talk.