Cherrypal Africa The $99 Netbook

Cherrypal recently released their latest product, the 7" Cherrypal Africa mini-laptop, that can be ordered for an initial price of US $99. The Cherrypal Africa is powered by an 400 MHz processor, allegedly an ARM9-based Samsung S3C2450, comes with 256MB DDR RAM, a 2GB NAND based flash-drive and is available with either Green Maraschino (GMo) Linux or Windows CE.

According to the Africa product page¹ in Cherrypal's online store the netbook has a 7 inch high-resolution TFT display with a maximum resolution of 800x480 pixels, a 86 keys QWERTY keyboard, built-in touch panel and offers connectivity via 10/100 Ethernet LAN and WiFi 802.11 b/g.

The Cherrypal Africa has 1 USB 2.0 port and 2 USB 1.1 ports for external keyboard and mouse, an SD /MMC card slot, a 7.4V 1800Mha built-in Lithium battery that lasts up to 4 hrs, 2 built-in 0.5W speakers and a microphone. This small device weighs 1.2kg (2.65 lbs) and measures 213.5 x 141.8 x 30.8 mm (8.4 x 5.6 x 1.2 inches).

So far Cherrypal, who also released a successor to their Bing netbook, don't offer much more detail about the Africa netbook and the Linux based Green Maraschino operating system. From their own words the company aims to accelerate the development of ultra-low energy consuming technologies and to help closing the digital divide between so called developing and developed countries. Certainly respectable goals, better information may help reaching them.

Via Linux for Devices

Update 18/02/2010

Check out the forum topics and blog posts linked from Wikipedia's Cherrypal page written by people who bought the Cherrypal Africa and did not get what they expected.

Update 12/05/2010

Removed the link to the Africa product page as it was removed from Cherrypal's online store. See the information on the successor models: the Cherrypal Asia 7" and the Cherrypal Asia 10" netbooks.