Zonbu I just came across what may be the perfect PC (for me–but quite possibly for you too). It’s called the Zonbu, and it’s a tiny, two-pound Linux box that costs $99. What’s the catch, you ask? Well, the machine is normally $250, but to get it at the discount price, you’ll need to sign on for a two year subscription to Amazon.com’s S3 data storage service. At $13/mo, that brings the total to $410 for two years ($370 if you pay upfront), this is not a catch for me, and I’ll explain why.

The Goods
The reason an S3 subscription is required is that the thing ships with no hard drive, only a 4GB compact flash card for storing the operating system and for caching frequently used files. Amazon stores everything in data cloud up in the internets, finally making “The Network is the Computer” a reality. There are several reasons this is a good thing. The first is that all data is automatically backed up and mirrored in some safe server, far from any thieves, typhoons, lightning strikes or HDD failures that may afflict my local machine. I belong to the 99% of the population that don’t make regular, or even half-way frequent backups, so this is cool. And since it’s Amazon and not some small startup named “Zonbu” that’s storing my stuff, I won’t have to worry about losing all my data if they go belly up. Awesomest of all, everything’s online, so if I need access, I have it, from any internet-enabled device, computer or phone.

The second super awesome thing about it is, it’s totally silent. Not just really, really quiet, but dead silent. No hard drive, no fans, no moving parts–quiet. This is a big plus for me because all of my previous machines have been really loud. They’ve whirred and whined, clicked and droned themselves into a bad place in my memory. It makes such a difference in a room to turn off the computer (though I rarely do this). A truly silent PC would let you hear soft dialogue in a movie, lower stress levels, let you hear yourself think. Grand.

The Bad

That said, there are a couple drawbacks. Networked storage means that when browsing or playing big files you’ll encounter a buffer period while it’s being accessed and sent to the cache on the CF card. This shouldn’t affect small files stored locally. If you want more space, you can upgrade the CF card, there are six USB ports for attaching external drives, plus there’s space for a laptop HDD inside if you like.

Next, no optical drive, or room to install one. Not a biggie, but they offer a slim CDRW/DVD USB drive for $50. Very good price and quite a handy thing to have around if you have older computers or ultra-compact laptops.

Also, to make everything so quiet and cheap, it’s a tad underpowered. There’s a 1.2Ghz processor made by VIA, a Taiwanese manufacturer that specializes in low power CPUs, and 512MB of non-expandable memory. The processor speed is higher than my last computer’s 900mhz PIII, and amazing in comparison to my ancient 266mhz Pentium II I ran until early 2006. The non-expandable RAM hurts, but not much, as I’ve never had more. My typical usage pattern consists of Firefox (95% of the time), Azureus (50%), iTunes (30%), Office/Skype/movies and other (10%), so I don’t expect any performance issues.

Finally, there’s no way to install programs not in the Zonbu repositories. Why they would do this I’m not really sure. It makes things über-secure, true, but Zonbu runs Linux, so it was already. The best I can come up with is that they want to provide a limited support ecosystem for the device and not confuse grandparents or little kids who they see as their target market. Zonbu takes care of all backups and software updates automatically, and includes all codecs to play music and video files already, so this idea fits with that.

Anyway, this last restriction is a bit much to accept and very well could be a deal breaker for me…but there is a workaround. By installing the free Community Edition and by applying software updates manually, you get to install what you want.

Regardless of how cool it is, I already have use of a computer in the hostel, so can’t justify getting one myself just yet, but if anything changes, I know what I’ll get.