SlashGear Japan
It looks as though one of the mainstays of the UMPC segment, Raon Digital, has closed business. After stock shortages have prompted concerns over the past few months, more recently speciality sites have reported no word from their contacts at the company and, according to Pocketables, Korean news sites have published bankruptcy notices.
To compound the issue, Raon Digital’s website – www.raondigital.com – has been taken down, and a search with their register shows that it’s not merely a case of the company forgetting to renew the domain. It’s unclear what impact this will have on existing customers and service for their devices; when similarly UMPC-devoted OQO folded back in May, they were forced to tell users that “financial constraints” meant no further warranty repairs would be possible.
Raon Digital were responsible for the Vega and Everun slate-style UMPCs, and – most recently – the Everun Note. The latter device, a netbook-style clamshell, was in fact one of the best performing ultraportables around, in no small part because of its AMD Turion 64×2 Dual Core 1.2GHz CPU.
2 Responses to “Raon Digital reportedly bankrupt: another UMPC firm folds”
Vincent Nguyen July 14, 2009
Thanks goodness. The sooner these companies go out of business the better. We won’t have to spend time/resource covering them.
-1Chris Davies July 14, 2009
I disagree – the loss of small, unusual companies like Raon Digital has a negative impact on innovation within the industry. Their high-performance Everun Note preceded any of the NVIDIA Ion based netbooks we’re starting to see, and while it was far from perfect you could argue that it demonstrated to more “mainstream” manufacturers that people might want portability AND power in a single device.
+1