Paul Allen shaves $500 off the Flipstart

The UMPC market is still pretty small, but that doesn’t stop manufacturers from being able to charge premium prices for devices with somewhat mediocre feature sets, all in the name of extreme mobility. Vulcan Inc’s entry into the UMPC market, the Flipstart, is one of the segment’s least attractive machines, sporting a flip up screen and tiny thumb keyboard that makes a Sidekick feel like a full size device. All of that notwithstanding, the biggest strike against this thing has been its price. It was impossible to justify dropping $2,000 on a Flipstart, when an OQO 2 could be had for roughly the same digits. Thankfully, Vulcan has seen the error of their ways, announcing a $500 price cut effective immediately. Following someone, Vulcan? This brings the cost of the 30GB, 1.1 GHz Pentium M-having Flipstart to a mere $1,499. Seems a bit better, right? Well, maybe not…

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