Friday, February 04, 2005

After two weeks of writing about Apple's Mac Mini, I have tiny PCs on my brain. This time, it is AMD's Personal Internet Communicator -- a $185 PC that probably ought not to exist at all, but I'm glad it does. The PIC's stated objective is bringing computing to 50 percent of the world's people by 2015, and to do that, AMD is selling the little bugger through third world phone companies and ISPs. I think, with a few modifications, they should sell it here.

The PIC is not a canonical computer, it's an embedded Internet appliance somewhat along the lines of the 3Com Audrey I wrote about a few weeks ago, though without a built-in display. The PIC's strengths and weaknesses are precisely the same, and depend only on what kind of user you are. It can't accept new applications (the OS is Windows CE). It keeps user changes and personal settings on a separate disk partition so that the main OS partition can be updated at any time back to factory settings from a hidden 'factory reload' partition. It has no legacy interfaces at all (just VGA, RJ11 modem, AC'97 audio ports, and four USB 1.1 ports). It has no fan or even any passive ventilation. It has a 366 Mhz AMD Geode processor, 128-megs of SDRAM, and a 10-gig Seagate hard drive. It is ugly. But balancing that it is cheap, cheap, cheap.