I just came across this information - a company out in BC has invented a virus-free laptop that costs less than $300 (virus-free because it does not have an internal hard drive - operating data is stored in a ROM chip). It seems that the target market is those who have not yet owned a computer. I'm curious about what your thoughts on this little machine are... how successful it might/might not be, good/bad idea, etc...
Specs
Freescale i.MX31 Processor
Supports 1024 X 768 True Color Video Output*
(RGB and LCD) Plus mpeg 2 hardware decoder
4 USB 2.0 ports, 1 USB 1.1 port (for keyboard)
2 SD slots
256 MB Ram
1 GB NAND Flash, containing read only file system (compressed)
128 MB Flash stick / mp3 player (external)
1 Stereo minipin audio out, stereo minipin line in, stereo minipin mic in
1 RGB out for VGA monitor
10/100 Ethernet jack, USB Wi-Fi
802.11 b/g WiFi
110-220 Volt input power supply
5-8 Hours of battery life
8.6" Diagonal SVGA display (4:3)
Supporting 800 x 600 True Color
*with internal LCD disabled
virus-free laptop
On
2008-03-29
2
comments
2 comments:
Its not a crazy idea, I bought something roughly similar quite recently an Asus Eeepc. In particular I have the Eee PC 4G model.
Now a quicklook at the one you posted and the filesystem is actually stored on a flash chip that is technically writeable its just not setup as such. I have essentially done the same thing to my eeepc but I left a portion of the system writeable for stuff like browser bookmarks.
Give its specs I would say its a Linux based machine. Technically you could configure any computer with Linux and give it the same read only filesystem to prevent viruses. That being said this of course wraps it up in a nice little package for the end user without them having to set it up as such.
Overall its looking like we are going to be seeing a ton of similar devices in the near future as there is definitely a demand for them. I love having my Eeepc as a secondary computer but being a power user it will never become my primary.
I would absolutely love to give something like this to my grandparents, the only problem is do to their vision I would still need to get them a larger external monitor. The more appropriate market would be as cheap computers for kids to use.
I'm gonna cut my comments short for now, but I could honestly talk about this forever. I love these sort of systems.
I agree that we'll see more of them, and that they will fill an emerging need in the computer user community.
I'm currently waffling between a new MacBook and an ASUS Multimedia laptop to fill my needs for mobile computing.
There are lots of really compelling reasons to go Mac, but the prices are just so much insanely better if I stick with a PC.
One of these light duty machines won't work for me as I've got some pretty serious apps I want to be able to run.
Interesting times, that's for sure.
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