Free PC With French Broadband Connection

robson writes "Neuf Cegetel announced the purchase of AOL France, an ISP that counts 500,000 broadband subscribers and the arrival of 'the box,' an Internet access terminal. Code-name: Easy Gate. It's a computer, working under the Linux OS. It's a router. It's a DSL modem. It's also a telephone. All in one. Easy Gate will be available from November, the actual 'box' consists of: an Intel 852 GM, 6 ports USB 2.0, 512 Mb of RAM and 512 Mb of Flash memory."

Comments

Re:This Thing Is Pathetic!

[Koatdus]

``All you'll get is a stripped down KDE or GNOME environment with Firefox/Konqueror and Kopete/Gaim (I'm assuming so much at least).''

Firefox, Abiword, Gnumeric, MPlayer, some mail client, spam filter, Ekiga softphone, and some unspecified, custom-built MSN client.

``You couldn't even have space for documents.''

You can get all of the above in well under 512 MB, leaving plenty of space for documents. Multimedia would be a different story, of course, but you should be able to get a nice collection of songs on it.

No.

I suspect that what you will get is a browser in "kiosk mode" that connects you to your aol start page. You will be able to sign in to access "premium" content, chat clients, your aol serviced webmail and a news portal. They will probably also include some online storage and maybe even a word processer. You will also be able to surf the web.

The premium content will include streaming music and video that looks like the current video that you can play if you go to www.aol.com. There may even be on demand tv or movies.

With a usb port they may have plans for a webcam add on and ip video phones.

The 512MB of flash will probably be used to cache content. There may be tie in's to music devices that will allow you to purchase music from the online music store and download it through the usb port to your mp3 player. The interface will probably not look anything like gnome or kde.

The French Linux hackers will have a blast making it do all kinds of cool other things. (lucky dogs)