Cherrypal is a new company that has created the world’s most affordable, easiest to use and greenest desktop computer. It only uses 2 watts of power, lasts 10 years, and has 80% fewer parts. There is no software updates and operating system to deal with and has free 24/7 support. The company is based in Mountain View and the system costs onyl $249 and is suppose to have started shipping already. The C114 desktop comes with a Firefox browser, OpenOffice, Mplayer, Instant Messenger (Yahoo, AOL, Google, MSN, and Skype). The system is a small black rectangular box about the size of a book measuring 1.3″ x 5.8″ x 4.2″.

It uses a Freescale’s MPC5121e mobileGT processor, 800 MIPS (400 MHz) processor with 256 MB of DDR2 DRAM and 8GB NAND Flash based solid state hard drive. It should be sufficient for basic web usage and email and with a solid state drive, performance should be pretty good. With 8GB of space, however, dont expect to be able to save music or movies onto it.

The desktop is suppose to last 10 years which is probably meant to show how reliable it is but how many people actually use the same desktop for more than five years. If you think about it, ten years ago, Microsoft’s OS was Windows 98. Since then there are about five newer versions of Windows not including the numerous service packs.

Another thing that it mentioned was that there were no software updates necessary which surprised me because software updates are always crucial, but then I found out why. The CherryPal Hypercloud technology uses a single software layer technology as opposed to the standard three combining the operating system and browser. The reason no software updates were necessary was because the CherryPal system actually gets the updated programs and data from the web or the “CherryPalCloud” which gets updated at bootup. Cloud computing is the future of computing and CherryPal is taking advantage of the technology to simplify the traditional personal computer making software and operating system upgrades and issues all irrelevant to the user. It should also perform a lot faster without headaches and prevents viruses and hackers as the hardware is not exposed.

For commercial and educational usage, it can probably be a great desktop but I have not seen any reviews of it yet, so we will have to see how it performs. It almost sounds too good to be true.