Last year an Australian group called One Education introduced the idea of a 2-in-1 laptop/tablet for students, featuring a modular design that makes it easy to upgrade or replace the screen, battery, camera, and core components including the CPU, memory, and storage.
But a crowdfunding campaign went nowhere, and now it looks like the modular laptop has been put on the back burner.
Now One Education is taking pre-orders for a much less ambitious 2-in-1 laptop that’s only real distinguishing features are the semi-rugged design, the green and white color scheme, and the fact that the non-profit organization behind the laptop is still hoping to produce a modular version one day.
The new Infinity:One laptop is expected to ship in August, and it’s available for pre-order in Australia for $318 AUD (about $238 US… although it’s only available for shipping in Australia).
The tablet features a 10.1 inch, 1280 x 800 pixel toucshcreen display, 2GB of RAM, 64GB of storage, and a 7,500 mAh battery. It has an unspecified Intel Atom quad-core processor with a top speed of 1.92 GHz (which makes me think it’s probably an Atom x5-Z8350 chip), and a keyboard dock that lets you use the tablet like a notebook.
It also comes with a stylus (and a loop on the side of the tablet for storing the stylus when it’s not in use) and a macro lens which you can place over the camera.
Ports include a microSD card reader, micro HDMI port, USB 2.0 and micro USB 3.0 ports and the tablet has a 5MP rear camera and 2MP front-facing camera.
While the original Infinity modular laptop was designed to support Windows, Linux, or Android software, the scaled-back version will ship with one option: Windows 10.
The new Infinity:One may be a far cry from the modular computer One Education originally wanted to build. But this version will probably be a lot cheaper and easier to build, which means it has a much better chance of actually shipping on time.