Thai firm flies in early-80s style keyboard PC
Ready to connect to your telly
Fed up waiting for Asus' Eee Keyboard to show? Asian mini PC specialist NorhTec may be able to sort you out with a keyboard-encased computer real soon.
The Thai company this week said it will show off its Gecko Surfboard at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas early next year. The product will go on sale shortly afterward.
NorhTec's Gecko Surfboard: harks back to the early 1980s
The $99 machine runs Linux on a 1GHz x86-compatible processor, the Vortex86MX, which also contains graphics and I/O circuitry.
It's not exactly a serious number cruncher, but NorhTec reckons it's fine for basic web browsing, email and instant messaging duties. Crucially, it's a very low-power part able, it's claimed, consuming just 5W.
The Surfboard has 512MB of DDR 2 memory on board, plus an unspecified hard drive, pair of USB 2.0 ports, 10/100Mb/s Ethernet, SD card reader, VGA, and composite-video for connecting it to a telly.
All the ports are round the back
The notion of which brought back fond nostalgic thoughts of the Sinclair Spectrum, though NorhTech's Gecko Surfboard more closely resembles the Acorn Atom and Electron than their rival.
In addition to the Linux version, NorhTec will offer a Windows XP model for $150. ®
COMMENTS
I think you are all missing the point
These plus WinCE accessing Windows terminal server, citrix winframe etc.
Desktop PC terminals are still way over priced. These could change the ENTIRE game.
why not?
Or more to the point; why is it up to you to decide what other people buy? Why have you got a problem with what other people buy? Why would it affect you if this was sold in the UK if you don't want one? And why don't you just pull your neck in?
The boy who cried fail
"So a crappy wee 1GHz CPU and 512mb running Linux is suitable for the web? HA HA HA HA!"
Are you six years old or something? Can't remember a time when CPUs were less than 3GHz and weren't bundled with 4GB RAM so that Vista could float around in the memory without running aground?
Flash != Web
Anyone who publishes any web content other than streaming video in Flash doesn't know how to program for the web.
Anyone who uses the web for nothing but streaming video doesn't know how to use the web.
Anyone who can't get Flash working acceptably on a low-powered Linux box doesn't know how to use Linux.
