I’m fascinated by the hotel industry and the Aleutia Labs have long focussed on designing a PC able to stream HD content (720p) into the rooms of the world’s luxury hotels. The challenge is that no one paying $600/night wants to be kept awake by the drone of a PC humming along and so any HTPC must be completely silent. It also has to have either an HDMI or a DVI port and ideally SP/DIF optical audio support. It has to be small (ideally VESA-mountable), low power (since it will be on all the time), and it must be competively priced. The silent B1 was initially designed for this purpose and its dual core CPU and onboard ATi 3200 ensured that it could play 1080p with ease (less than 50% CPU utilization). But it overshot the needs and was just a little too big.
The Fanless H1 (H for Hotel) is our next revision and is purpose-built for the in-room entertainment industry. It fits in the hands, has no moving parts, and thanks to the onboard Nvidia GPU (and 1.6GHz Atom 230 CPU) it can smoothly play 720p and 1080p content. 2GB of 667MHz RAM (the FSB is 533MHz), Gigabit Lan, HDMI and DVI port, as well as Optical Audio Out.
Power is supplied via an external brick with power consumption of just 30W.
Runs Ubuntu Linux, Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows XP, and Windows Embedded Standard 2009 (formerly XPe). For Linux and WES users, we’re offering it with 8GB of flash storage, ideal for media streaming.
HTPC (whether Windows or Myth TV or Boxee) users have the option of a 2.5″ Drive up to 500GB. Priced from £199/$300.