Cheap internet appliance

[pm]

For Christmas my mother got my grandfather an Audrey. At first I thought this thing was the most pointless thing on the planet ("It tries to be a computer, but it's not a computer despite costing more than a computer&quot😉, but after a little playing around, I see the point.

In fact, I started thinking that we could probably use a small, compact internet appliance thing in our house. Something with a small active-matrix screen, that takes up very little space. But they all see to require subscriptions to dial-up services and we are running on a cable modem (with the house wired with 100Mb/s Ethernet into a router), so I don't think any of the ones that you can get at Circuit City will work for us.

Any suggestions? I was thinking of something pretty cheap (<$400).

 

[OS]

You'd probably need a custom machine like a hacked i-opener. The kind of machine you are describing would have an incredibly small market segment, like you, maybe me and a handful of other people. 😛

 

[pm]

Since I posted this, I did a bit of prowling around. The i-opener looks less hackable - and it's a lot more expensive than it used to be ($400 now vs. $100). Intel has one, but I don't think that regular consumers can buy one (before anyone replies, &quot;but hey, pm, you work there, you aren't a regular consumer.&quot; I looked through the corporate store and didn't see them anywhere, so I don't think Intel employees can buy them either).

The best one that I've seen is the $200 ThinkNIC from Oracle. Look here.

 

[ArkAoss]

there was one called the websurfer, the mainboard on it was only short a network card chip, from intel, do a search for a thread by me on the websurfer, it links to a few sites you can find info on em, i have one to spare, if you think you might want to hack it a bit, lemme see if i cant find that thread

 

[ArkAoss]

yeah a few good links in this thread

lemme know if you'd like what info i have on the websurfer

 

[blargyblarg]

you can get an i-opener for $150 from the home shopping network:

Link

also, you can get them for $200 at http://www.netpliance.com.

 

[RossMAN]

Have you checked out the ePods yet? If so, what did you think?