"The machine's pitched at schools, but we can see plenty of folk considering the MiniBook as a simple, inexpensive web surfing device."

... or a small form-factor webserver. Stick Apache, mod_perl and whatnot on it and Robert is indeed your mother's male sibling.

Also, this is the sort of device I would have killed for when I was doing field-service/troubleshooting work back in the day - the spec as is would have been ideal for that kind of thing, plus the thing is fairly compact, doesn't weigh 3 tons and looks fairly rugged.

I might even break my own "I'm not going to buy any more bloody computers!" dictum and pick one up. Hell, at that price it's almost worth picking up a bunch of them and making a baby Beowulf cluster just for the hell of it ... aaaah, just like the old days but without annoying management :-)