Zonbu $100 Linux PC: You get what you pay for

Remember the Zonbu, the mini Linux PC that sells for $100? Well, the folks at Gizmodo got some hands-on time with the device and they seem quite impressed with the machine and its library of on-board Linux software, claiming that the PC "is amazingly as simple to use as a Mac." As it turns out, the 4GB of onboard flash memory is only meant to serve as a cache for the 25-100GB of storage that you'll be getting on Amazon's S3 servers--a "virtual hard drive," if you will. Not all is rosy with the Zonbu, however--remember, it's still a $100 PC. "Apps open slowly, but when they're going, I had no problem using multiple apps at once," Gizmodo's Brian Lam reports. Despite that fact, the Zonbu took about four times as long to rip a CD as a MacBook Pro. What's worse is that you can't install applications onto the Zonbu's tweaked Gentu Linux image. Considering that this is supposed to be an open-source machine, that might just be a deal-breaker.

For more on the Zonbu:
- see this Gizmodo article