Thousands and thousands of people been testing the Medion Akoya Mini out for the first time in Germany, Austria and Holland over the last few days and I’m sure there have been quite a few photo galleries, unboxing videos and first impressions. I’m one of those many and as most of the owner-reports will have been in German or Dutch, Iit makes sense that I put my own thoughts out in so that people get a feel for how the UK version might be (there’s no confirmation on this BTW) and how the sister device, the MSI Wind might perform.

I’m going to take it from two angles. First, a general look to see how the device sizes up for the average buyer and secondly, a look at the mobility features which are important to many people reading UMPCPortal. Before I start, a word about the average buyer. It looks like the average buyer will range from young to old, from home to office and from work to play but in most cases I think buyers are computer-literate and realise that this netbook isn’t ideal as a primary computer. I spoke to a Mother of five in the queue at Aldi when I bought it and she was buying one for her son who needs it for studying. I saw a 50+ guy with one under his arm and since I’ve had mine, all the family have expressed interest for different reasons. My brother thinks it might be good as a second, travel-light work PC. My wife also thinks it will be good for her health company presentations and my mother’s eyes lit up when I told her it would connect to a normal monitor and keyboard and that it was more powerful than the big, noisy, hand-me-down she was using to check her emails in the spare room at home! I suspect this profile matches over 90% of buyers and for these users, the Medion Akoya Mini is near-perfect. As for the mobility users and the others (with big fingers or high expectations,) there are major issues. This isn’t an Ultra Mobile PC. Let me take you through my first impressions and you’ll see why.

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Everything is easier when you are first in the queue! I was waiting outside the supermarket at 0730 this morning wondering whether I had the right time and the right place but thanks to the second person in the queue who knew the people working at the shop, we found out that there were Akoya Mini’s awaiting. By opening-time there were about 10 people waiting and four of us went straight to the cash desk to buy the Mini. I had a look at their ’stock’ which was piled up at the cashiers feet. In total, about 6 devices on two cash desks. That looked to be about it! Despite that, it looks like many thousands of people across Germany, Austria and Holland got their hands on their first netbook this morning.

I was home 15 minutes later and of course, have done some unboxing photos for you. I’ll leave the first impressions and video until later today as I’m supposed to be on holiday and we’re visiting Baden Baden today. I doubt I’ll get much time until this evening.

Enjoy the photo set until then and if you need to ask questions, add them to the comments below and i’ll do everything I can to answer them over the next few days. I won’t be back at the home office until Sat evening (live video session anyone?) but i’ll do my best.

The full gallery is here. (Full res pics later)

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

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.