Cheap PCs set to destroy the IT world

WHEN VIA finally starts shipping its no-frills $200 laptop, the device will shake up a broad range of things in the PC and peripherals world.

I've already noted how the announcement will effectively torpedo sales of the OLPC effort and Trip Hawkins' Foleo glorified-Trio accessory. $500 bucks? Ha!. The OLPC is already near $200 and nobody seems to be ordering them in the quantities deemed necessary to start production. Via could effectively divert parts and pieces off of their line to build an OLPC-like device - ruggedised for the Third World - and come up with an 80 per center that ships by the end of the year without requiring a minimum order of millions and millions of dollars out of cash-strapped countries that could better spend the money on clean water and basic health care.

But I digress.

Walking into the Big Box, I was struck at the pricing on something as mundane as a 7-inch to 8-inch LCD digital picture frame. These single-use devices, carefully packaged to look like real picture frames, have limited memory, a bunch of interfaces like Wi-Fi, memory card reader, sometimes built-in speakers, and list between $180 to $250 dollars, depending on screen since and other bells and whistles.

Take off the keyboard of a $200 Via laptop, package into a picture frame and… voila! Via is now in the digital picture frame business. Or someone else is that OEM's Via's parts and puts them into a pretty wooden frame. Mix and match the motherboard with larger size LCDs to customize your own photo displays.

Portable DVD players are another area that is going to get stirred up. A 7-inch LCD DVD player can be found for under $80, with some 9-inch wide screen players going for $102. If you're building a portable LCD DVD player, you are some flash RAM or hard drive, a keyboard, and an OS away from a laptop. Sooner or later, someone will find the right LCD DVD player to hack so they can run a Linux on it. Yes, no doubt the MPAA will come running once it happens, but hasn't that horse been out of the barn, out in the meadow, and sired a bunch of children already?

Cheap PCs may, with much better software support, finally end up freeing a bunch of us from the tyranny of the laptop. A $200 laptop could be shoved/bolted into the $400-800 TV sets showing up into hotel rooms, so a weary traveler could simply plug his USB frob into the side of the thing and do some work. It won't be an overnight revolution, but cheaper flash and portable software make this more likely down the road.

Perhaps the most fun is waiting to see what is built on top of Via's cheap laptop hardware in the future. Hopefully the company will throw some money at someone to “hobby-ize” the kit in the future so you could go down to a Fry's, buy the basics and some accessories, and then build your off-the-shelf robot or remote sensor platform or whatever, with no soldering iron; just screws and connectors. µ