A company called Zonbu is offering a paperback-thin desktop PC for $99 that runs Gentoo Linux on 4GB of internal flash. Where are all your files stored? On Zonbu’s $12.95 a month servers, that’s where. Made by some of the same folks who built the Vudu, I’m 100% certain this will become a nicely subsidized hacker’s toy in the first two months its available. Once the service flops, expect to see a wonderfully active Zonbu mod collective adding hard drives, web servers, and remote controls to this bugger.
Apparently it has lots of handy software built-in in include Firefox and Openoffice, but I’m not sure why you couldn’t buy an old Pentium for $50 on eBay and install Ubuntu for the same effect.
Sucker? Every minute?
I think the whole premise of this product is to offer a low power PC alternative to low tech people or save users who want an extra PC. It only uses one tenth the power of a regular old PC.
There are a lot of -potential- good applications for this. I’m a fairly heavy PC user and I’m looking at shifting the bulk of my day-to-day home PC work to this, with the XP machine available via KVM for heavy lifting and gaming. Powers savings is one aspect, noise or rather silence is another… Boot and response time factor in as well. Read more on my blog http://mrzonbu.wordpress.com/