Marvell Technology Group Ltd., a company that makes chips for a range of high tech products, communications equipment, cellphones, etc, has planned to launch a new kind of computer. The company has named it “Plug Computers”. Like its name this device would be plugged in to home electrical sockets and would be of socket like size. Yet it will have enough power to manage user's digital media and enable them to view it over the Internet from outside the home.
In today's digital world we store each and every information in the digital form as texts, images, videos in digital cameras, cellphones, notebooks. In such a way we are storing our personal information in dispersed style – in the form of files, that make them inefficient as well as risky. Losing a laptop or mobile phone will cost us losing a precious photo or video.
Marvell is promoting the "plug computers" as a perfect solution for this. The idea is to have an ultra-small computer plugged into an electrical socket. Despite the small size the plug computer will have enough processing power and network connectivity to manage and serve media stored on an attached thumb-drive or hard drive. You can access the plug computer over your home network, enabling you to get at your files from wherever you needed in your house.
However this idea is not new and Apple's Time Capsule works a little like that. It acts like a central repository for data by wirelessly backing up all the connected Macs. HP's MediaSmart Servers are a host of "smart" external hard drives connecting a PC via USB and store your media longterm, and serve it to connected TVs and audio systems without needing the PC's intervention.
Marvel is planning to miniaturize all this technology and make it small and convenient. The company is also emphasizing on the green aspects as well by maintaining the eco friendliness of the plan. Plug computers are supposed to draw less than 5W of power that is much less compared to a PC running as a media server.
Company is planning to launch it on a small and economic-enough scale. Marvell will be sourcing the chips while partner companies make the software & hardware. The price is interesting targeted at $50 that makes this idea different from other tech solutions.
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