Digital Home Thoughts: Zonbox: The $100 Green PC of the Future

"I just got to mess with an incredible $100 PC that is being compared to Apple in terms of ease of use, uses Linux as its core OS (but conceals the complexity of Linux, much like OSX conceals the complexity of UNIX), and is at the outset, a Web 2.0 device leveraging heavily its connectivity to create the Apple experience for a fraction of the cost. It does have a monthly charge of about $13, which covers the online services and allows the initial price of the PC to get down to $99, but it may reflect the future of Web 2.0 computing, and it’s worth a look. While I’ve historically not been a big fan of Linux PCs, this is because they aren’t that much less expensive, are generally more complex, and the tradeoffs are ugly. The Zonbu Zonbox caught my attention, because it actually comes very close to what Apple provides at a fraction of the price. About the size of a Mac Mini and costing much less than what that system costs, this offering is close to complete and will even work reasonably well with your iPod (you can’t buy music off of iTunes, but since most don’t do that anyway, it isn’t a big problem)."

One of my biggest concerns in the latest rush to come up with the $100 PCs is the lack of focus on hardware that really supports digital media. Moreover, the fact that it is running Linux made me think that multimedia is certainly going to be de-prioritized. However, I was pleasantly surprised to read that it has a good music player called MPlayer that behaves a lot like iTunes, and has a photo organizer called F-Spot. It also allows you to do do some pretty cool web development, and while you won't be able to play any of the latest games, it comes equipped with a decent sized library of arcade style games. Not bad for $100.