You may have heard about the new super-cheap PC called the Cherrypal. It's essentially an ASUSTeK Eee PC, only without the monitor, keyboard or mouse. Very limited storage, just a 4MB flash drive. When you buy a Cherrypal, you also get a 50MB online storage account. Just login and access your files that way. Cloud computing is the future. Right?
The Cherrypal is about $250.00. It only has two USB ports, so if you have a mouse and keyboard hooked in I am not sure how you're supposed to be able to transfer pictures from your camera or hook up your iPod to download tunes. The bigger question is what happens to your free 50MB storage account when Cherrypal goes out of business? Before you say it won't happen, remember that the history of personal computing is riddled with failed companies.
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5 comments:
I like the Eee PC, but I won't buy one until they upgrade the quality of the display. Once they do that I think it will be a great portable PC to carry around.
I've written before that it's absurd for mainstream PC manufacturers to continue cranking out these big steel boxes. Kudos to Cherrypal for building a small, energy-efficient PC. Too bad this first (and I think only) generation of the Cherrypal lacks so many vital features.
@Lou
The Cherrypal is not an EeePC.
R&B
Most all of the usb keyboards I've seen have usb ports so you can plug your mouse in ala serial. Yes, cloud is the future but so is solar and wind but we're still a very good ways off from it being pervasive.
I agree it's not an Eee. Actually Asus is producing a desktop Eee and the specs are very different. The Cherry uses Freescale semi's which is interesting. But, like pervasive wifi and the whole web 2.0 pervasiveness drivel is probably in the future but as I said is still a ways off.
I've been giving it a lot of thought and I really could see getting by with cloud storage since the 3 or 4 places I use my laptop (the school am going to be teaching at next year, my apt, the place I get coffee, the kolache place, and even the library offer free access. So I could reasonably get buy with a small hd/ss drive with the really important files. The rest could live out in the ether. My concern is the ether going chapter 11 and not being able to access my files.
The Cherrypal is not an EeePC.
Yes, but it is similar in that it is a super stripped-down PC with no hard drive, a small amount of storage via flash memory, and like the EeePC it is designed to be primarily a device used to hook up to the "cloud." Dunno about you, but I have a huge amount of data that I have acquired and want to keep. A year's worth of movie files of my kids alone is easily 10 GB. I guess you could hook up the Cherrypal to a portable hard drive and use that for storage, but why not just have that in the device? Hard drive prices continue to collapse, they are tiny (look at the 160GB drive in an iPod), and they don't use a huge amount of power.
Actually I just bought a usb powered Seagate drive with 250gb drive for under $100. I remember buying a maybe 200mb scsi drive years ago for many hundreds of bucks. Since I don't download movies or that sort of thing, I really can't use that much space but it was cheap and huge. Makes backup easy as heck.
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