Some of these are gadgets, clearly accessories to another PC. Others are special-purpose. One is clearly a general-purpose PC with just about everything except big drives built-in. As I predicted months ago, this year ARM will intrude into the desktop PC space in a serious way. For less than $100? Even I did not expect that so soon. I am used to new technology coming in at top dollar… It’s a whole new world of high volume and low prices on Day One of new products. Except for a few niches, the old PC is on borrowed time. Who needs the weight, freight, heat, noise, size, cost and maintenance of those old things? Very few.

My favourite is the Mele A1000 using the Allwinner A10 chip. It has a real SATA port and USB ports so you can hang a ton of storage on it and a keyboard and mouse.
“1. Video output – HDMI, CVBS, VGA .
2. Audio output – R+L, SPDIF
3. Usb host port + SDCard slot.
4. External SATA port (real SATA not from usb)
5. Ethernet.

Internal board has
1. UART port connector.
2. USB device port connector
3. MIC pin
4. CVBS-IN pin.”

RAM? Only 512 MB. Shucks. It would be just about perfect for far more tasks with just a bit more. So, you may need an external storage device and switching contexts could be slow. My little woman has a PC with only 512MB and she does manage to run out of memory with Chrome fairly easily. I am surprised that in $70 they could not find it in their hearts to add some RAM or a socket.

There’s one important device missing from the following list, the Trimslice, a tiny desktop PC with 1gB RAM, a better CPU and a much higher price.

see 9 itsy-bitsy, teeny-weenie computers

Lest some troll claim “It didn’t happen” or otherwise rewrite history, I thought I would at least document the fact that an Android/Linux product did sell well retail globally. Clearly, Google, Android and ASUS are acceptable brands for the consuming public.

“TABLET VENDOR Googles 16GB Nexus 7 has already sold out in the UK, just days after the tablet was released.”

see 16GB Google Nexus 7 is sold out in the UK – The Inquirer.

We get 399K hits for nexus "sells out" on Google.

It remains to be seen whether Google and ASUS will ramp up production as ASUS did for the eeePC or will Google be content to just set a standard. There’s already a lot of competition in Android/Linux devices. OEMs may not welcome Google’s competition. OTOH OEMs may be glad Google is eating its own dog-food.

For Google, I think the number one reason for pushing Nexus 7 is to stimulate the tablet market. They are not happy with iPad’s current share. One clear message may be that Apple can be beaten on price/performance using Android/Linux and OEMs need to concentrate on lowering prices to make iPad too expensive for the majority of buyers. That may be the case now but a high-profile name like Google pushing a modestly-priced tablet makes it clear to most consumers that lower-priced is not a bad thing.

Whether you love GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) or hate it, GIMP has a significant presence in IT. It’s affordable and useful for lots of things people do with images.

“GIMP is an amazing image editing software package similar to Adobe Photoshop, but licensed as free and open source.  The latest version of GIMP (2.8) has been downloaded over 6.5 Million times in just two months, so this is a huge community of skilled & dedicated users.”

There’s going to be a magazine for professionals using GIMP.

see First Issue Of GIMP Magazine Coming – Muktware.