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Viliv Checks in at Best Buy

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Looks like Viliv and Best Buy have hooked up. According to CrunchGear, Best Buy is going to be selling the S5 (two different versions), the X70Ex Slate, and the S7 Convertible Notebook. According to jkOnTheRun shoppers will be able to start dropping cash on these beginning tomorrow.

If you’re in the market for the S7, you can also get a $50 rebate if you purchase a MiFi card (Sprint).

2 Comments

2 Comments

  1. Absolutely NoOne

    03/21/2010 at 8:21 pm

    Wow, that’s a surprise… good prices or bad, do you think?

  2. Sam

    03/21/2010 at 11:14 pm

    There appears to be at least one pricing error, the price for the S73GUS (S7 Premium with 3G and 32GB SSD) seems to be low by about $150-$200. Otherwise the prices are pretty similar as on Amazon and Dynamism. The S5 PRE-H US, S5 Premium with 60GB hard drive is priced about $50 higher than on Amazon, otherwise with the other previously mentioned exception is the same.

    There also appears to be one/two spec errors, the S5 models seem to have the 3G on the wrong model.

    Whether these are a good value are a different question.

    Compared to media players/MIDs like the Zune HD, Archos 5 Internet Tablet, and Apple iPod Touch, these are rather expensive and much larger and heavier; while the viliv devices can run lots of Windows applications, the touch user interface experience of Windows XP (or Windows 7 which you can install) is very bad in comparison.

    Larger non-x86 tablets (often ARM running Android) could be tough competition, though at this point, there isn’t much available. enTourage eDGe is supposed to be shipping, though its large and heavy. The Apple iPad will be available very soon, barring a disaster. Hard to say what is likely to be available this year, but the roll call of interesting slate devices from CES and Cebit is long (Archos 7 Home Tablet, Fusion Garage JooJoo (actually this is based on Atom, but not running a Windows OS), HP Slate, Notion Ink Adam, ICD Ultra…)

    Archos claims the Archos 7 Home Tablet will be $179–a lot less general purpose computing power, but should be a reasonably capable video player and internet tablet, less than 1/2″ thick and 0.8 pounds.

    The iPad is an interesting comparison: bigger, thinner, weighs about the same as the 7″ vilivs (the 5″ S5 is 1/2 pound lighter), better touch user interface experience, a restricted application store.

    An almost direct competitor, available now, is the Archos 9 PC Tablet, a 9″ 1024×600 slate, resistive touchscreen, Z510 (1.1 GHz) Atom, 1 GB, Windows 7 Starter, slightly larger but thinner, very slightly heavier than the 7″ vilivs, no built-in GPS, at $549.

    From the more capable side, netbooks are much bigger and much heavier, but are more powerful and generally cheaper (the Lenovo S10-3t convertible netbook starts at $550, the only real deficit is not having built-in GPS, but it has a capacitive multitouch display; the standard clamshells are much cheaper).

    For me, the big comparison would be the Fujitsu U820 UMPC. A 5.6″ WXGA display convertible tablet that weighs in at 1.5 lbs with a Z530 Atom (1.6GHz) and GPS, claimed 7.5 hour battery life. Last year, these retailed for $1200+, but now you can get new-in-box units on eBay for under $500.

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