Cherrypal: We’ve made a $99 laptop

Think netbooks are the cheapest, most underwhelming computers around? Cherrypal would beg to differ with its $99 mini-notebook.

However, as you read on, I’d recommend keeping a dose of skepticism handy.

Make no mistake, the Cherrypal Africa is not a computer you could use for serious tasks, and even Cherrypal founder Max Seybold admits it. “The Africa is slow, but works and is robust,” he told PC World. It’s got a 400 MHz processor, 256 GB of RAM and 2 GB of flash memory, running on either Linux or Windows CE. Screen size is 7-inches, though it looks like the frame is a bit larger, allowing for the slightly cramped comfort level of a netbook.

In addition to being dirt-cheap, Cherrypal says the Africa is environmentally friendly, using less components than other manufacturers. The company also claims that wind energy is used to power its Web site.

Unfortunately, things get a little sketchy from there. From the main Web site, I can’t figure out how to buy the thing. I can get as far as Cherrypal’s jump-off page for its online store, but clicking the store link takes me to an error page, which redirects to what looks like a Russian news Web site. And Cherrypal says it’s based in Palo Alto, Calif., and Hong Kong, so that redirect makes little sense.

It’s possible to view the Bing’s product page through a Web search, at least, but if the company was serious about marketing and selling a product that lots of people are talking about, they ought to have that shopping page up and running on day one.

The Bing isn’t Cherrypal’s first product, having released a cloud-based desktop computer last year and a simple netbook, also called Bing, earlier this year. But the latter product is presumably discontinued, and TG Daily, which got a review copy of the cloud computer, couldn’t confirm that they were being produced in large quantities. If the $99 Bing goes on sale any time soon — and that looks like a big if — it could suffer the same, obscure fate.