Zonbu Desktop Mini Review
It’s a clever concept, if not exactly a fresh one: Sell or give away a PC, then make your money on a monthly subscription fee. The Linux-based Zonbu PC costs only $99 and promises to be “greener” than a typical PC, and it offers more than enough power for tasks such as browsing the Web, making Skype calls, or watching the latest movie trailers from QuickTime encoded in MPEG4. (Just keep them to 480p max.) But looks (or, in this case, price) can be deceiving. The Zonbu costs $99 only if you subscribe to its online storage (via Amazon’s S3 network) for $12.95 a month for two years. It costs $149 if you go with a one-year subscription. If you don’t want the online storage and all that it comes with, you can buy the system outright for $249. Sound familiar? Then you’ve probably purchased a cell phone in the past decade.
The Zonbu PC essentially has two versions. In the locked-down $99 version, users can’t access root on the Linux OS, which means they can’t do much damage, let alone change anything beyond the wallpaper or adding Firefox 2.0 extensions. The $249 “Community” version offers full access and the ability to add additional programs through the Gentoo package manager. (Linux enthusiasts will want to know that the Zonbu is built around Gentoo, kernel 2.6.17-ck1, using xfce as its desktop environment.) Zonbu requires a broadband connection for both versions.
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