CherryPal and Cloud Computing a Cheap, Viable Alternative to Your Computer?

Does computing on your 1200 Watt, quad core processing monster make you feel guilty? Do you compost everything? Do you stuff your pillows with your own hair so as not to waste resources?

No? Me neither.

But sometimes it shocks me how much my electricity bill is due to my "gaming" computer, which is rarely used for gaming anymore, hence the quotes. Alas, once I leave work, the last thing I want to do is stare at another LCD screen for more than 20 minutes, except to check a few sites that are blocked at work (YouTube!), and walk away.



Which begs the question: Do I really need all that power? Probably not, and it seems it's on that reasoning that the CherryPal C100 Desktop was born. The C100 takes up a whopping 2 watts of power, is as small as a book, and does everything I generally use my home PC for. Oh, and it has no moving parts. NO MOVING PARTS! "You could play tennis with it," said CherryPal CEO Max Seybold, a bold claim if I ever heard one. I have thrown Bernoulli disks into a wall across the room with no ill effect, but nothing since then has been close to that durable.

Hardware specs include a 400 MHz Freescale MPC 4121e mobileGT processor, 256 MB of RAM, 802.11g Wi-Fi, dual USB ports, Ethernet, 4 GB of flash storage, VGA out, and a headphone jack. It also weighs less than a pound (10 ounces).

The CherryPal C100 comes with Open Office, iTunes, an IM client and media player, while web browsing is done with a Linux version of Firefox. For data storage, the CherryPal Cloud keeps most of your applications on the internet, taking care of "all the technical details, like upgrading or installing software, keeping the system free of viruses, and dealing with the operating system...so you never have to worry about hackers and viruses, and data backups happen automatically, so you'll never lose a file." How much storage, you ask? 50 GB for free. Not bad, not bad at all. For a mere $249, this might be worth picking. GO GREEN BABY! W00T!

You can see reviews of other computers too, here at TopTenREVIEWS.

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