OStatic

A few days ago we reported on efforts from Freescale, Asus and others to take netbooks--many of them running Linux--down to the $200 range. CherryPal may be approaching that price with its new Intel Atom-based Bing netbook (shown) that runs either Linux or Windows XP. The price is undisclosed until it ships in March, but this week only CherryPal is offering it and its C114 green nettop system in tandem for $400, as LinuxDevices reports. The price for the combo, given the C114's normal $250 price, imply that CherryPal is exploring how low portable computer prices can go.

This morning we got the news of the official launch of the CherryPal computer: a tiny little box consuming only 2 watts of power, booting in 20 seconds, and yet offering the oomph of a desktop computer (albeit an older desktop computer, as it requires a VGA monitor). This is achieved, apparently, by offloading most of the work to the cloud using Amazon's servers. While the prospect of a truly green computer is intruiging, from the open source point of view this effort does not seem to be fully-baked yet.