$150 Laptop: Machine or Myth

Mathew Elliot wrote in the Crave blog about a Swedish company selling a laptop for $150. The Medison Celebrity features a large, wide-screen 14-inch WXGA display and weighs a reasonable 4.8 pounds. Powering the Medison Celebrity is a 1.5GHz Intel Celeron M 370 processor and 256MB of memory, a CD/DVD drive, wireless Internet, 40 GB hard drive, stereo speakers, 3 USB ports, and other features. The Operating system is the Fedora Linux OS.

On paper this sounds like a great deal and possibly doable given the components listed. In the present configuration the Medison would not be able to run Windows Vista. However, you can do some tweaking like upgrading the RAM to 1 GB so it could run at least a basic version of Vista or XP. At $150 you could buy two. One to use and one to experiment with.

Now before head online to find a way to purchase a Medison beware of this machine. You know the old cliche's about if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is. There are many skeptics who wonder if this is a fraud. No major details have been given out or versions of the machine shown to the press or anyone else. Also, the president of the Medison, Valdi Ivancic, has plans to become Sweden's prime minister. The company who will be handling U.S. sales, 2Checkout.com, has posted a letter about these concerns and are promising customers' credit cards will not be billed until the item is shipped. The company further says they know Medison has been in business since 1996 but has not inspected the company or the product. Looks like 2Checkout.com is already doing damage control over this.

Medison says the Celebrity will start shipping in mid-August. Elliot, along with others, managed to order a Medison to see if the machine lives up to the hype. I will be keeping up with this story and will let you know what happens. Please stay tuned.

Meet the cheapest laptop in the world
2Checkout.com