Michael Kanellos

It’s a Computer That Runs on Two Watts, But Will It Sell? July 20, 2008 at 9:02 PM

Several companies–Oracle, Sun Microsystems, Sony, 3Com, OQO, Samsung–have tried to market simplified Internet computers as alternatives to PCs.

And to date, most of them have failed miserably. The public has just not bought into the vision.

CherryPal, the brainchild of longtime software exec Max Seybold, hopes to break the pattern, although it won’t be easy. The company in August will begin to sell a Linux-based computer that goes by the same name that will let users access the Internet, store data online and run the usual panoply of desktop applications (i.e. word processing, messaging, spreadsheets, etc.)

The difference? The CherryPal is about the size of a paperback book, it costs only $249 without monitor and only uses about two watts of power (not including the monitor) in active mode. By comparison, a regular desktop PC gobbles up about 114 watts in active mode while a notebook consumes about 19.5 watts.

Put another way, the CherryPal will only cost $1.58 to run for an entire year in some locations, he said. That’s 8 hours a day ever day of the year. Running a PC in the same manner would cost you about $35 or more a year, depending on where you live or what you do with your computer, according to calculations I did on my own. (I used 10.26 cents a kilowatt hour, the U.S. average earlier this year) Thus, as a replacement computer, it’s not a bad deal. You will save money on hardware and lower your power bill. If you are a school, particularly in an emerging market, the reduction in the power bill will be a boon.

Granted, the power consumption goes up when you add a monitor. A LCD screen consumes about 41 watts of power a year. While that keeps the power consumption well below the power required for a desktop, it boosts it past the level of a notebook. But at $249, it will cost less than a notebook. The device will be aimed at people who have a few PCs at home so I’m not counting the price of an extra monitor.

Seybold admits that PC-like devices have failed in the past, but for good reason. Larry Ellison’s network PC was a great idea in concept, he said, but it required broadband, and the broadband infrastructure was largely nonexistent back in 1998. Other PC-like devices lacked features. With the CherryPal, owners will be able to go anywhere on the Internet. They will also get 50GB of free storage through the company’s cloud computing service and access to various applications. Some applications will come loaded on the machine and others will be accessed through CherryPal’s site.

The CherryPal sports a PowerPC chip from Freescale rather than an Intel chip and will have 4GB of flash memory for storage, 256MB of memory and a 802.11g WiFi chip. The processor runs at around 400 MHz, a speed that hasn’t been seen in desktops in nearly a decade. The operating system, however, is fairly lightweight so the performance differences with a modern desktop will be comparable, he claimed

“You can compare it to a 2GHz processor,” he said.

Besides selling these to consumers, CherryPal will also sell the device to schools, both here and in emerging nations.

Will it work? It will be tough to get recognized in the market, but Seybold does have a point. Times have changed. Lower power consumption does give users a tangible benefit. Consumers have also, through smart phones, become acclimated to the idea of computing on non-Windows devices. NComputing, a start-up founded by EMachines founder Steve Dukker, is slowly but steadily selling more of its low-cost, low-energy computers.

On the other hand, the public has been highly skeptical of alternatives. That 400MHz processor won’t be an easy sell. Worse for CherryPal, if the device takes off, there’s not a lot to prevent the Samsungs of the world from making copycat devices. (Even PCs will compete if they must. Dell this week is selling a desktop with a 250GB drive for $299.) CherryPal’s main intellectual property revolves around the security protocol that connects the user to their free storage and applications that CherryPal provides them. The security protocol doesn’t even get activated when the user connnects to the Internet rather than their pod of free storage on CherryPal’s cloud.

Then again, the company has a whole bunch of pre-orders. It plans to sell the device through its web site at first and will later expand to Amazon.

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