7iDigital

Hi Folks, last week, there was a news release by PC World about a company in China/Taiwan releasing the “world’s lowest cost laptop”. Here’s the crux of that article:

A company is now selling what it calls the “world’s cheapest laptop,” which at US$130, is not a bad deal if you can bear some hardware limitations.

The Impulse NPX-9000 laptop has a 7-inch screen and comes with the Linux OS. It has a 400MHz processor, 128M bytes of RAM, 1G byte of flash storage and an optional wireless networking dongle. It includes office productivity software, a Web browser and multimedia software.

There’s a caveat though — it has to bought in bulk, in units of 100. The laptop is available on Alibaba.com through the online store of Taiwanese company Carapelli Ltd.

BUT the same model has been in the market for the last 6 months already(!) and some vendors have been offering it at retail price (single unit price) for about $185, and in a few cases with some better specifications too.

As you would have noted, their cheap price is with 100 units MOQ (minimum order quantity), which means its not for retail customers. To us, the cheap price looks more like a marketing pitch because some the existing suppliers can give similar pricing with 100 units MOQ.

In fact, we have been seeing this laptop/UMPC for a while now - its of a new genre called UMPC (ultra mobile pc), and come with very less RAM and Solid State Flash Hard Drive — okay for browing the web and helping a kid pick up computers, but not okay for professional work involving multiple browser tabs and open files.

As we have been arranging our low cost laptop models, we have evaluated over 100 laptop suppliers across APAC, Europe, and America, and we wanted to share some things with you, so that you are fully aware of the risks with buying Cheap Laptops:

1. The real risk of buying a cheap laptop is not about its technology, but about its supplier. Alibaba and MadeinChina have a lot of fake suppliers. We are not saying this supplier is fake, but it is a fact that for every genuine supplier, there are 4 fake suppliers. So you have to be very careful.

2. Fake suppliers will attract you with a very cheap price, but just before the order, they will say stock-over, etc, and try to push you into buying a more expensive laptop. These are again the signs of a fake supplier, who wants to extract the maximum cash from you.

3 How do you identify a fake supplier on Alibaba or Made in China? Just follow these steps:

(a) Is the supplier using company domain id in emails or Hotmail/ Yahoo/Gmail? If they are not using their company domain id, then just walk away. They are very likely to be fake. And you have no way to track them.

(b) If the supplier shares his payment info (esp Western Union) right from the start — its a big red flag. Walk away. Serious suppliers will wait to give the payment info only after all Q&A is done. Try to insist on PayPal payment because it has buyer protection (in this aspect, EBay is good because PayPal is mandatory).

(c) Always ask for at least 2 customer references - email and phone numbers. And buy only when you have spoken with existing customers. Those suppliers who refuse to give customer references (for any reason) can be assumed to be fake.

(d) Sometimes suppliers will show you online shipping tracking numbers as proof of shipping for other customers - but that’s useless because fake suppliers would send a $10 USB drive on shipping to some address in your country, and use that tracking number make you believe it was a laptop shipment.

So if you can’t speak with existing customers, you should not do business. As simple!

We are coming up with a new website (name not to be revealed yet!) in the next couple of weeks that will help everyone flag fake suppliers, their email ids and websites. We believe a lot of people will benefit because you can also cross check if your supplier is reliable or not. You can use our new site help in fighting online fraud.

So if you haven’t done it already, please sign-up so that you will know about this valuable new site when its live, and you can also share it with your family and friends. Thanks for coming by.