Shenzhen, China-based smartphone design company Tranzda Technologies is marketing five phone designs that use its NewPlus Linux phone application stack. All five Tranzda designs include GPS, along with optional features that include WiFi, cameras, and biometric fingerprint authentication.
At $379, the Aspire One is cheaper than the runaway hit Eee PC from Asus, whose 9-inch version begins at $549 for the Linux version, and the $499 Linux-based Hewlett-Packard Mini-Note. (CNET has not yet reviewed the Aspire One, but stay tuned.)
The same configuration with Windows XP will run you $299, or for the same amount of money you can purchase a 160GB/2GB system also with Linux. Microsoft won't allow PCs to be sold with > 80GB HDDs preloaded with Windows XP and thus the top end configuration is only available with Linux.
Maybe it's all a plot to keep Windows XP alive. To prevent a mass defection of these products to Linux, Microsoft has said it will continue to make XP available after its June 30 retail cutoff date, to these low-cost, low-power systems that simply don;t have the horsepower to run the newer operating system well.
There are now only two years left in the administration of President Lula. Given the vast institutional shifts to free software that have occurred, it is hard to imagine an economical way to rollback these projects - not only the changes within state-owned IT firms but the many other projects that Brazil has launched with free software: the massive Digital Inclusion project, the educational Linux projects as well as the general use of open source wikis, project management software, groupware, and so on.
ProcessMaker, the company, uses open source software "for just about everything we do," Reale says. Most of the workstations run Ubuntu and OpenOffice.org, along with Knowledgetree, MediaWiki, Drupal, phpBB, Zimbra, and SugarCRM. "We tend to us open source as much as possible ... to streamline our operations."