UK retailer Carphone Warehouse is reportedly pulling a Linux-powered mini-laptop from its line of computer offerings. The Elonex Webbook is a VIA C7-M powered lapttop that runs Ubuntu Linux. Carphone Warehouse reportedly ordered about 60,000 of the custom notebooks from Elonex, but was finding that customers returned the Webbooks in unusually high numbers. The top complaint seemed to be that the operating system was unfamiliar.
Carphone Warehouse plans to replace the operating system on the computers with Windows XP.
The company gave away the mini-laptops for free with the purchase of a long term wireless data plan. To get a no-strings-attached version of the Elonex Webbook, you had to shell out £264 or about $525 USD. Carphone Warehouse will likely increase the price a bit to cover the cost of Windows XP licenses.
via TechRadar
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