kriston's Journal: Cherrypal Africa Windows review

The unit is a very small and light, slightly customized version of those $100 laptops that have been spreading across Asia for the past year or so. The model I ordered runs Windows CE 6.0 and a suite of custom installed programs like various media players and document viewers. The Youtube application does not work but the rest work fine. The machine is rather slow but it browses the web just fine. The word processor is also good. Some applications are formatted for Pocket PC (the menu bar is on the bottom instead of the top) but Windows CE users are used to this. A benchmark I ran says 200 MHz but I believe that speed is actually due to power management which is always adjusting the CPU speed based on your usage of the unit.

My unit came with some nasty glue that I had to clean off, presumably from stickers that were removed from the original manufacturer. The Cherrypal brand stickers are coming off, too.

I had to order this thing four different times. The credit card processor changed each time, too, but no money was stolen from me. The Cherrypal people say the delays and strange circumstances were due to hacking attempts but my own observations make me speculate that too many customers complained to the credit card ordering processor which caused Cherrypal's account to be terminated for undelivered goods. I persisted through four different ordering processors since December of 2009 and eventually got my unit in late March 2010.

When you order the Cherrypal Africa you are not guaranteed any particular processor type, memory, or screen size, just the minimum specs. This means that your processor can be ARM, MIPS, some x86 variant, or maybe even a PowerPC. Most people seem to have gotten what I have, which is a "VIA" ARM-VT8500 and I'm not really sure if that's the real "VIA" from Taiwan. It also has 128 meg of ram, WiFi, and 2 gigabytes of NAND flash.

In conclusion, I expected what I had received, which is an extremely basic laptop. One thing I didn't expect though was that the "Windows XP" spec was changed to just "Windows" when I had originally ordered it. If I had realized that it is Windows CE I would have ordered the Linux version instead.