Fruity PC Comeback

Those of you who have been around computers for a few years may well remember the Fruit Wars of the early 1980s, indeed one of the very first home computers I wrote about was the Tangerine, back in the late 1970’s. In fact it was little more than a very large printed circuit board, smothered in logic chips, and you had to add your own keyboard and light bulbs, but it was a start… Anyway, soon afterwards we had more useable machines from the likes of Apple, and Apricot, not to mention quite a few lemons, though to be fair I don’t remember anyone actually using that name. But the rest, as they say is history, with only one fruity PC maker managing to survive.

Anyway, this preamble is by way of reintroducing the Apricot brand, last owned by Mitsubishi though by the late 1990s it had all but disappeared. Now it’s back, and one of its first products is a new mini-notebook, called the Picobook. To be honest it doesn’t look a lot different to the current crop, and bears a striking resemblance to the Acer One. It’s powered by a Via C7-M processor, there’s 8.9 inch screen (1024 x 600), 60Gb of HDD storage, 1Gb RAM, Windows or SuSe Linux S, built in webcam, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and optional WiMax and up to 4 hour running time. The single USB is a bit of a letdown and I couldn’t see any mention of an SD slot, so no points there, but the price is a going to be around £280, so it’s looking quite competitive.