CherryPal vs. the Laptop

They other day my wife's laptop died. This is a serious inconvenience to her, as she uses her laptop for both work and home. As a medical practitioner she often has to look up drug interactions, print off medical forms, and investigate new treatments. At home she looks up recipes, watches movies, plays sudoku, authors documents in MS Word and reads her Email.

So after reading about the new CherryPal, "Get onto CherryPal's 'Cloud Computer'", I started wondering if a Cloud based computer could replace her need for a laptop?

My first premise is that the computer will be hooked up to our HDTV as the monitor with a remote Keyboard and Mouse. That way we don't incur the additional cost of a monitor. Using this premise I can figure out the cost differential between the new CherryPal and a basic home laptop, say the Dell Inspiron Dual Core with 2GB RAM and 160GB Hard Drive.








As you can see the CherryPal comes in about $300 lower than the Laptop, not bad. So now to the real question - can it replace the laptop for functionality?

* Only Streamed Videos, this precludes iTunes and Amazon UnBox
** Their web-site claims that "We provide drivers in the cloud to support printers", I am dubious about how this works and how well
*** Documents will have to be converted from MS Word to Google Docs


So is it worth it? No movies, not portable between home and office. Saves us about $300 over the laptop. For us the answer is - No. The inability to truly play movies is a killer. Given that our premise is to hook up the laptop to our HDTV so that we don't incur the cost of a new Flat-Screen Monitor (and have to find someplace to set it up) - not being able to play Amazon Unbox or iTunes movies would be crazy. If I go and buy a new flat-screen monitor I wipe out the $300 price savings and still can't move the system from home to work.

I think the concept of a truly web based Cloud Computer is cool. I have thought so since Sun Microsystems tried to produce their first "Java only" desktops in the late 90's. However, as a consumer machine it falls short of the need. For certain Enterprise applications, especially enterprises that run almost all of their applications in a web model, the device might have a good fit. But for me - I'll stick with the Laptop for now.

So the real question is - stick with Microsoft or jump ship and get an Apple?