Tulip E-Go

Move over, Apple.
Fruits are out, florals are in.

Meet the Tulip E-Go, the personalized, designer "lifestyle" notebook, with interchangeable covers, from Dutch company Tulip Computers (Dutch...tulip...get it?). It launched in Europe in October 2005, and arrives on American shores sometime this month. (I wonder why they couldn't move the U.S. distribution up a couple of months...they totally missed the Christmas season.)

These are only a sampling of some of the designs; there are others--everything from abstract art motifs, to various animal prints, to black lace.

The shape reminds me of a purse or a powder compact. Obviously, these are primarily marketed to women (and gay men). To appeal more to all men, Tulip might want to consider coming up with some more masculine designs as well. A tweed cover, perhaps? Maybe a design collaboration with Brooks Brothers. Or maybe some kind of a car or motorcyle motif? I can imagine creating a cover to look like a Cadillac grill. Then of course, you can go the sports route. It wouldn't be that much of a stretch to tweak the basic Tulip notebook shape slightly in order to resemble a football.

If you like things to sparkle, you'll want the Tulip E-Go Diamond:

"Tulip E-Go notebook inlaid with solid palladium white gold plates in which thousands of brilliant cut diamonds have been set. The quality is V.V.S. top-Wesselton and the total weight is 80.00 Crt. The brilliant cut diamonds are microscopic and pave set with surgical precision. This magnificent end result is possible thanks to the use of brilliant cut diamonds with a large variety of diameters. A unique square cut ruby has been set in both Tulip logos. For the Tulip E-Go diamond project, Marcel van Galen Design worked closely together with Design Department product engineering and Laurent de Beer Master Jewelry Designer. Consumer price EUR 283,000 (USD 378,900 / GBP 197,000). "

I don't think my entire house, including all of its contents, including the car in the driveway, costs 378,900 U.S. dollars.

Ahhh, a diamond and ruby encrusted Tulip...
Forget long stem roses. This is the perfect Valentine's present.

And it is a real computer, by the way. Not some pretty little play thing. Specs:

Processor
AMD Turion 64 Processor MT family
Internal cache memory
1.0 Mb L2 cache
Chipset
ATI Radeon Xpress 200
Memory
1024Mb So-Dimm DDR internal memory (2 slots)
Type of memory
PC3200 DDR