Last October, I covered my first motherboard for Webware: the Asus P5E3 Deluxe/WiFi-AP (check out the video).
It was a Webware story since it was, at the time, the only motherboard to ship with "Splashtop," an embedded Linux OS with Firefox and Skype. With this capability, 15 seconds after you hit the power switch, you could be online.
The idea is that it makes it possible to shut down the PC when you're done with it, yet still be able to pop online in a hurry to check something on the Web.
The browser works just like Firefox. Because it is Firefox.
The only problem with the P5E3 was its eye-popping price: $350. It also requires ultraexpensive DDR3 RAM. But apparently, the Splashtop experiment has been a success, and Asus is releasing new, more down-to-earth motherboards with the feature.
The "P5Q" series of motherboards will launch this month, and Asus expects to ship more than a million in the first month of production. AnandTech reviewed one of the models, the P5Q3 Deluxe (no mention of Splashtop, though).
Asus laptops with Splashtop will also ship this year. The company already ships a series of Linux-based Eee PC ultralight laptops, but these don't use the Splashtop technology, which comes from DeviceVM.
Personal rant: Asus, I'm mad. I just built a new Vista PC using one of your P5E motherboards. I wanted the embedded Linux feature but didn't want to shell out for the P5E3 Deluxe. I would have waited. You could have told me. More on my Vista build in this Real Deal podcast, Rafe builds a new PC:
I just got a chance to try out a Webware PC: a computer built around the new P5E3 Deluxe/WiFi-AP motherboard from Asus. What makes this motherboard be hardware for Webware is that it has a Firefox Web browser (running on an embedded Linux operating system) burned into ROM. It also has Skype. You turn it on, and in fifteen seconds (I timed it), you can be in Firefox and surfing the Web.
You can also boot it into Windows, or whatever OS you have installed on the hard disk. Boring.
This built-in browser has a lot of great things but some drawbacks too.
In the plus category: This alternate operating system, provided by DeviceVM to Asus, is fast and convenient. There's no giant OS to boot before you get into your browser, which is a slimmed-down version of Firefox, not some weird, quasibrowser that doesn't do what you want. There's a Flash plug-in installed so most modern sites render properly. Flash videos play just fine. The system saves all your settings (including bookmarks) in memory, so you don't have to start from scratch every time you fire it up.
The P5E3 motherboard has nearly everything built in that you'll need. Connecting to a network--wired or WiFi--is fast and easy. Skype has access to the board's audio in and out ports.
Because the DeviceVM platform doesn't have access to the hard disks connected to the motherboard, the system is very secure. So if, say, guests wants to use your PC to check their Web mail, you can boot them into the ExpressGate environment (that's what Asus calls it) and not worry about them junking up your PC. You might want to clear your private data from the Firefox cache first, though.
The browser works just like Firefox. Because it is Firefox.
And this motherboard is "green," at least in theory. Many people leave their PCs on all the time, because launching a browser from a cold PC can take several minutes. With this setup, you can turn off the PC when you're done browsing, and when you need to get back online, you can be there in seconds.
If you work primarily online--using browser-based tools like Google Docs for productivity, Salesforce.com or Basecamp for business operations, Meebo for IM, and so on--this setup is just great.
Should you get one of these motherboards just for its ExpressGate feature, though?
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