O2 Xda Flint takes it to the netbooks

Fwd Tech  Thursday 15 January 2009

Netbooks? Pah! O2 laughs in the fascia of netbooks, with the Xda Flint

New netbooks are emerging daily (see the new Archos 10), but O2 is trying to reverse that trend by arguing that netbooks, on the whole are very average, whereas its Xda Flint is, well, not.

O2 can’t pull the wool over our eyes though. We know that this is essentially the HTC Advantage X7510 PDA with a paintjob. Still, O2 has a point when it says that this is probably more suited for day-to-day affairs than your average netbook – and it’s more portable too.

Packing some serious heat in the form of a five-inch VGA touchscreen, a detachable keyboard (so it turns into a sort of mini-laptop), GPS, Wi-Fi and HSDPA connectivity, a built-in webcam and 16GB of internal Flash memory, O2 is arguing that this is what school kids should be using instead of their bulkier counterparts. Apparently, O2’s also throwing in the likes of downloadable timetables, access to education portals and eBook reading – so you won’t have any excuses for not reading Thomas Hardy’s Far From The Madding Crowd then getting shouted at by the teacher in front of everyone, then wetting… sorry, just had a terrible flashback to English class, then.

It’s also busting out Internet Explorer and Opera 9, so kids can distract themselves from doing their homework on the fly with stupid YouTube vids of dogs surfing in Hawaii. We don’t know. School kids nowadays have got it so easy…