Green Personal Computing

This section covers a recent trend observed among some mass market devices oriented towards cost and energy efficiency. It may or may not be a viable and durable trend, yet these devices seem to get more and more present

Cost/energy/feature-efficient computers

While a large portion of the mass market computing is increasing hardware needs and multimedia performance, some devices tend to focus on usability, simplicity, robustness and/or efficiency.

Their user interfaces radically diverge from traditional ones (such as the OLPC's Sugar Interface, aimed at social interaction], or Everex's gOS aimed at web software).

Real world products and devices

Very low power consumption devices

These devices consume less than 10W, are mostly fanless (noiseless)

* Zonbu's mini: 99$ or subscription-based, comes with web storage services (Amazon S3)
* French ISP's Easy Gate
* French Linutop
* Koolu's "Works Everywhere" Appliance, priced at 299$ and shipped with Ubuntu 
* The world's lowest cost thin client? -- 85$
* fit PC, 295$ 3-5 W and the size of a papersheet (see specs for more details)

Light, low cost laptops

* Asus' eeepc, ultra light laptop under 300$
* Everex's eeepc competitor
* Sear's sub300$ laptop, shipped with commercial Linspire Linux distribution

Light desktops and laptops

* Wallmart began selling Everex's GPC, which is a full featured, Linux-powered destkop computer priced at 199$
* Small form factor computers vendor Shuttle announced a sub 200$ desktop dubbed KPC Linux PC

High-end, multimedia oriented

* Splitted Destkop Systems: Splitted-Desktop Systems is designing low power, high efficiency set-top boxes which support HD TV, Voice Over IP and Full Internet

Non-profit initiatives

* OLPC, laptop.org
* Pixel Qi aims to produce an even cheaper OLPC

Resources

* Shuttle's $200 Linux PC Part of a Trend? on SlashDot
* Other Everex devices
* Greener Gadgets conference