Share This
Pretty Posts
WHILE many in the mobile industry agonise over whether this country needs a locally built smartphone or tablet, the traditional desktop computer has been reinvented by South Africans.
Sandton-based Cloudware, a division of MICROMega Holdings, has come up with a device that resembles an Apple TV set-top box, but is designed to change the experience of computing rather than of television viewing.
The CloudGate is a fully fledged computer, but without monitor, keyboard or mouse. All of these can be plugged into the device, and it is then connected to the internet by a fixed-line network or Wi-Fi.
The box holds mainly the operating system and applications, but typically not the user’s data, which is ideally stored in the cloud. For the old-fashioned consumer, it still has an 8GB solid state hard drive and a mini SD memory card slot, for limited local storage.
The device was initially built for businesses, but it has enormous consumer potential, thanks to a price tag of less than R2 000. It runs on Google’s Android operating system, which is overtaking BlackBerry to become the most popular operating system on smartphones in South Africa.
Even on tablet computers, where Apple’s iOS initially dominated, Android is now the most common operating system in South Africa. It is only in the laptop and desktop world that Google has seen little takeup. Limited availability of devices running the Google Chrome operating system has meant that Windows continues to dominate traditional computers.
The team behind CloudGate initially…. (READ MORE HERE)
Leave a Reply