Linutop 2 Mini PC Review

@StephenW: I can sort of see why the Linutop case and custom engineering might add to its cost, what I was trying to say was that I can't quite make out why no PC maker is marketing a cheap generic EeeBox type PC at eg the £149 price point. The main components (M/B with Atom CPU in situ, HDD, small/basic case etc) are all readily available at low cost, but everyone seems to want more markup on the complete PC than is available on eg a cheap laptop/netbook - assembly costs on such a PC should be minimal and what other costs are there? I'm no conspiracy theorist, but I've got a theory that it's a conspiracy (ie between maker/distributor/retailer). No-one wants to first to let the market operate as it should and to offer a genuinely low cost Atom-based desktop.

Consumers are not very knowledgable people overall when it comes to technology. Seeing an extremely cheap desktop, purchasing it, then realising it does not perform will simply alienate customers. As a retailer, you probably have to balance customers expectations with value for money. As a mainstream consumer knowing nothing much about technology purchasing a desktop pc. I would be annoyed if at work I could watch HD youtube videos, then finding when I got home, the pc was stuttering playing the same content and not having a clue it was down to the CPU.

I don't see why XP can not be installed on this kind of computer.
Neoware -now HP- used to sell Thin Clients with XP embedded on a 256 Mb flash disk. Near to impossible to install any extra software (or drivers for that matter, like HP printer drivers) on due to the disk being practically full from the start, but proofs it is possible to install XP on a very small footprint.
Processor was not the most powerfull either with a VIA C7@700 to 800 Mhz. It works but lags often while working with it.
The price would be even less competitive with XPe though.

@ John Dann
I can see where you're coming from, but the electronics market is too fragmented for any conspiracies.
I think you've missed the target market of this device (as was pointed out in the review). It is intended for presentation use in environments where processing power is not critical but power consumption is. It also helps in situations where a licence fee for the full Microsoft Office suite is not desirable (even though OpenOffice is a poor performer by comparison, cost is a highly important factor). Since the target market is small - and is definitely not the capricious end consumer - then the manufacturers have to go for high margin in order to recover their development costs and overheads (consumers ALWAYS ignore these as they expect then to be near zero, but aren't always).

If I was one of the target market for this, I'd be looking at giving my employees low power laptops. Many corporations give their employees laptops these days that can be taken to meetings, so in-built presenation computers are pointless. That coupled with the fact that deals with the likes of Dell or HP or whomever get you cut-price laptops with full installations of Windows AND _support_ for the devices and software (something the Linux community is famously bad at), and I am distinctly unsurprised by the mark up: with the limited number of sales this device will get, they're going to need to claw back all the money they can get off this.