I’m away this week and so far It’s been a tough holiday for Internet connectivity. Not only am I with three generations of my family that don’t quite understand why I pull a mobile phone out every time we reach a town, but the villa we’re staying at, a fantastic wooden house on a hill in the heart of the Black Forest, is right on the edge of any sort of GSM reception. Every now and again I’ll get a bar of reception and a few tens of packets will fill the google.com/m pages that I’m using to keep updated. No, I haven’t been using a UMPC, just my mobile phone and my wifes notebook PC. I’ve had no time to write anything more than a short ‘I’ll get back to you soon’ during the day so there doesn’t seem to be any point at all in taking the UMPC. I can consume my important sources of info more easily on the N82 in these situations. If I need to do anything serious in the evenings, the notebook is available so again, there’s no point in trying to use something that’s going to make life more difficult. It’s easy to see how niche UMPCs are when portability and quick, inconspicuous, one-shot consumption are the most important requirements. Smartphones fit in so much more easily in these scenarios.

UMPCs aren’t far away from my thoughts though as tomorrow I’ll be slipping out of the villa at 7am to head up to the nearest Aldi to check out the situation with the Medion Akoya Mini. I’m planning to turn up about 30 minutes before opening time (say Hi! if you’re in the Freudenstadt queue)  seeing how many people are there and ask what they’re queuing for.  If there’s more than a handful of people waiting for Akoya’s I’ll concentrate on filming the possible mad dash to the cashier. If I’m one of the first, I might buy one (I’m a bit undecided yet.) I’ll let you all know how it goes!

Medion Akoya Mini specifications, links and info

A few days ago I highlighted July 3rd as an important one on the netbook calendar. Aldi Süd, an important supermarket chain will have the Alkoya Mini in stock as part of one of their Thursday offers.

MSI-Wind.de now reports that not only Aldi Süd will be carrying the product. Aldi Nord has 2000 shops and will also be offering the device. If that wasn’t enough, Aldi’s Austrian chain, Hofer, will also be carrying the device.

I’m starting to wonder just how many devices are going to be available in each shop. An average of 10, which would be around 40000 units, is probably not going to be enough but even with 10 per shop it seems like quite the production-run challenge. My advise to anyone in Germany is that you’ll need to be among the first through the Aldi door to stand a chance of picking one up. I’ll be in SchwarzeWald on July 3rd and am planning to be in the Freudenstadt (Peace-town!) Aldi just to see what’s going on. I’ll probably pick one up if I see one.

The Akoya advertising is now up on the Aldi Süd website. Image from ComputerBild who have a review of the Akoya Mini

There’s a wonderful institution called the ‘Aldi promotion’ here in Germany. Somehow this cheap, almost storage-room style supermarket with very few known-brands on the pallets has reached out to people from every walk of life. Aldi exists in other countries too but in the UK, you certainly wont find the chattering classes in there. I heard that it got the seal-of-approval from some A-class German celebs a few years back and since then, everyone is in there. I don’t need German celebs to approve it (not that I could ever spot one) because I was a fan from the first time I saw the special promotions.

Twice a week they make a feature promotion. It includes food and other goods and is usually done on a theme. Italy, gardening, DIY or home entertainment and it works exceptionally well. People sign up for the email notifications, exchange tips at the coffee machine (‘check out the Chateauneuf this week, my friend says it’s worth twice that much’) browse the website and make sure they pick-up the brochure in the shop that shows the offers for the following week. On the day of the special offers the leading products usually sell out in hours. Queues at 7am are not uncommon and there often a push and shove to get to the products first. One man even pulled a gun when he couldn’t find his dream PC, so you can imagine, with 1600 ‘south’ shops and 2400 ‘north’ shops in Germany (I believe owned and operated separately by two bothers although I could be wrong on that one,) hundreds of shops in other countries and this amazing twice-weekly marketing pulse they have immense buying and selling power.

On the 3rd of July, Aldi will be offering the MSI-Wind-based Medion Akoya netbook with XP, the 80GB drive, 1Gb of RAM and Corel WordPerfect for 399 Euro. Its one of the cheapest PC’s they’ve ever offered and it’s in a market that has huge momentum. News stories about it Germany are flooding out and today, the first Aldi brochure scan was made. By my calculations it seems highly possible that Aldi could sell 10 devices in every one of the 1600 Aldi Süd (South, the North shops aren’t carrying it) shops. That’s over 15,000 netbooks in a day! Lets assume that they’ve negotiated deals for other shops and countries for the same week too. We could easily be looking at a 20-30K piece order with the OEM here. Amazing. I’d love to know how much they got the devices for!

Apple sold 10,000 iphones on the launch day in Germany last year. I bet this netbook beats that by a big margin so I’m looking forward to the news stories in the evening of the 3rd!

News via Heise.de where nearly 500 people have made comments on the news item at time of writing!

Aldi Süd online information.

Click for Medion Akoya tech info and links.