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The CherryPal desktop is a tiny PC designed with the user in mind. It does all the things you do every day: surf the web, keep in touch with your friends, listen to iTunes, watch videos, word processing, presentations and spreadsheets, all without the hassle of a traditional PC.
Yet another attempt to birth the thin client. It’ll seem great all the way up until you can’t connect to the cloud, then people will remember why thin clients are the past.
CherryPal out sweetens Apple with 2W, ultra-cheap PC
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The CherryPal device strikes us as somewhere between a thin client and a full-fledged PC. The thin client part of the machine caters to the cloud angle where you’re tapping into software over the network. On the PC side, you find some local storage and enough horsepower to run semi-demanding applications on the device should the need arise.
When we posited this idea to Seybold, his look indicated that we’d got it all wrong. The man sees CherryPal as a true PC. Period. And it’s going to run software faster than your Vista or – dare we say it – Mac OS X-addled machine.
Again, al lot of the magic apparently happens through CherryPal’s mysterious cloud software delivery component.
But, er, Max. The kids love their iTunes, and you need a local component and quite a bit of storage for that. How will you appeal to the youngsters without iTunes on this machine? We can’t see Apple lending a helping hand.
"It was an important requirement for us that iTunes works without restrictions," Seybold said.
Intriguing.
We suspect that CherryPal will sell access to the software bits as some type of subscription service, although it’s, of course, not talking about that either.
"It will be very, very affordable," Seybold said.
Okey dokey.
Anyway, Seybold believes that the CherryPal team, which is also considering a laptop down the road, is inventing the future.
"This is a historic event with cloud computing," Seybold said. "In the past, you’ve had players like HP and Dell trying to build isolated computers. They have almost no intellectual property and are just assemblers.
"The market is desperately asking for greener devices, and we’ve got something that’s like an Asus EEE PC except much more powerful and at a much lower price."
And the CherryPal name? Well, we’re told that Cherry arrived because cherries are sweeter than Apples. Boo-yah! And the Pal bit points to the community aspect of sharing software via the cloud.
Someone please send us a puppy so we can tweet the hell out of it.
The isn’t anything new. MSN had WebTV years ago. It was my folks introduction to the internet.
Super Mini Me...Company : CherryPal
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Freescale's fast triple-core mobileGT processor delivers exceptional multimedia performance and feature-rich user interfaces, while only consuming as much power as a clock radio. CherryPal uses 80 percent fewer components than a traditional PC, and because it has no moving parts, it operates without making a sound and will last 10 years or more.
At least when the systems are X86 based you can run other software on them without too much difficulty.
This is PPC based. If you don't mind recompiling applications from source, which sometimes works smoothly, and other times ends up being a royal pain, you can run other software on what is basically equivalent in power to a decade old PC running Linux.
Otherwise you're stick with the limited functionality of the software it comes with and the web based software.
Unless you have a need for a tiny, low power (in both computing power and electric power) machine, save yourself the $250. Just stop by a recycling center that takes old computers and ask a person dropping one off to give it to you instead. What people are throwing away will likely have comparable processing power, more storage capacity, and more memory.
The Eee PC at least makes sense because its small size and power consumption are of significant benefit in a mini-notebook.
This comes in at the price of a gaming console, but with far less computing power.