The Hot-E a $100 Computer

When Australia’s Ansett Airlines closed down in 2001, John Nicholls decided that he didn’t want to be a pilot anymore. So he decided to follow his dream of building a $100 computer that would be good enough to compete with major companies such as Dell and HP. So John created the Hot-E, a computer that is a little bit bigger then a deck of cards and it only consumes 3 Watts of electricity.

Before you get your hopes up, the Hot-E has only 8MB of flash memory and an ARM processor, which is used in phones and mobile devices. But the Hot-E isn’t meant to be used as your main computer; the Hot-E is intended to just connect you to a web site. Some say that this is the first computer that’s meant for cloud computing, but for those of you who don’t know what cloud computing is, let me explain.

Let’s use Google Docs as an example. You have to make a presentation for work but your thumb drive is broken, so you decide to use Google Docs. When you’re done, you click save and Google Docs saves your work onto Google’s server - or now lately known as the “cloud.” So you go to work to present and you log on to Google’s servers and you take your work from the cloud and present.

So cloud computing is just basically taking your data that isn’t located on your computer, but in a different location such as a server. So the Hot-E could do a lot of things that a normal computer can, because you have Last.fm for your music, Flickr for pictures, Hulu for your TV shows, or you could buy a virtual hard drive for data. John Nicholls does admit that the Hot-E has its limitations and may not be appealing to everyone. Mr. Nicholls will present the Hot-E early next year. Who knew that a desktop would be smaller than a laptop?