Here comes the Esprimo Q5030 E-Star4
This new PC from Fujitsu is so much more expensive ($1000+) than the E2 and has a power consumption listed in its datasheet as TBD, that it hardly competes with us and is thus open grounds for discussion. First, I know "E2" is not the most inspired name but what kind of title is Esprimo Q5030 E-Star4, or even Q5030? This isn't some anonymous manufacturer from Guangzhou with a product on Alibaba, this is Fujitsu Siemens, icons of Germany and Japan, whose ads bombard me from the pages of the Economist! And their product page promises, "This full fledge, next generation PC has a volume of just 1.4 liters." Since I always think of computers (especially full fledge ones) in liters.
Disappointing marketing aside, this seems to be the first attempt by a Wintel assembler to challenge the Mac Mini in specs - up to 2.26GHz Intel Core Duo, DVI output, 2GB RAM, 250GB drive, and DVD-RW drive. Weighs 1.5kg (compared to Aleutia's 505g) but a massive improvement over "Small Form Factor" PCs (that regularly come in over 10kg).
Of course, we're (eventually) heading this direction as well, though with optional Blu-ray and integrated Zigbee.
Full Screen Video on the E2 and Why I Love LXDE
Aleutia E2 Playing FullScreen Video of Scary Robot Dog
YouTube is one of today's killer apps, and has been a key weakness of the E2, whose 500MHz Via CPU and onboard graphics chip struggled to play streaming videos at more than a frame or two per second, i.e. unusable. But we've just installed LXDE, a great "lightweight" windows manager that is much snappier and speeds YouTube up to "just kind of jerky".
Before today, downloaded divx files on the E2 running on Gnome would open and be extremely jerky and unusable, even at quarter screen. However, by installing LXDE (just 20MB) by following their instructions for Ubuntu, adding the Medibuntu repositories and w32codecs (to play Window Media files, and not have to worry about drivers), and using the fantastic MPlayer (we've fully removed Totem and aren't using VLC anymore), smooth full-screen video is possible without even frames dropping.
In the above video, I'm playing a downloaded .wmv file from Boston Dynamics, the company behind the amazing (and kind of terrifying) autonomous robot Big Dog.