A Boston-based startup named Litl is taking a big risk: they're betting people will go for a netbook that sports a Linux-based OS and focuses on Web-/network-based productivity (Facebook, Twitter, etc.). The risk is in the pricetag: $700 -- almost twice the price of computers that can do twice as much. Is there a market for this?

The Wall Street Journal officially broke the news, with Engadget running a piece about the tech specs of the Litl Easel. From a tech side, the device is pretty interesting. It runs Ubuntu's mobile-device software stack, and uses Firefox's Spidermonkey JavaScript engine to handle most of its UI-rendering duties. The back end is a mix of Amazon and Google's cloud-computing services, since the device stores very little data locally:

All machine data is stored in the cloud, so you can have a gorilla stomp on your litl, pick up another one, log on and instantly recreate your environment. (Since we developers are always abusing our prototype hardware, we've tested this a lot!) [*]

The other pieces of the puzzle are also pretty neat: it uses an HDMI connector so it can plug into an HDTV and work as a digital photo album. At 3 pounds it's decently light, comes with a 1.6 GHz Atom processor, 1 GB of RAM and 2GB of flash storage, g-band WiFi, a USB 2.0 connector, and the usual camera/mike combination.

So, as a technical achievement, the Litl's pretty slick. As a leveraging of open source, it's rather nifty.

As a marketing concept, I fear it's a disaster in the making.

The first and biggest reason: they're charging $700 for a device that is going to be bested by machines that cost anywhere from half to two-thirds as much. That's not idealism; that's naiveté.

Second: The Litl has been designed as a net tablet, but at the expense of just about every other kind of functionality. These network-based services are still, by and large, adjuncts to the desktop and not replacements to them. Most people, even if they do use FaceTwitGooTubeBookPage (or insert the name of your favorite service here), still don't have the vast majority of their personal data stored on such systems. It's back at home on their hard drives, which is where most of it is going to stay for a good long time.

As big a fan as I am of Flickr, for instance, I don't have one-twentieth of my photos up there -- not just because storage and bandwidth are limited, but because I don't particularly want Flickr to have that stuff in the first place. I give them what I think is worth showing to other people, and the rest stays put.

The Litl's billed as a "maintenance free" device, which I suppose is a two-edged sword in this context. It might well be spyware- and virus-free, but only because it's not running 95% of the applications that most PCs can use.  If someone buys this and then realizes the machine they just spent good money on isn't capable of running things the guy next door can run -- and on a machine that cost half as much -- they're going to be mighty sore about it.

What I see here is one of the last few burps from the dyspepsia that created the netbook in the first place. Back when the netbook was still a relative new concept, there was a bigger gap between the lower and higher end of the hardware spectrum as it applied to daily use. Now the gap has more or less closed, and $400 worth of computing buys you more than it ever did.

The whole concept of "only buying as much computer as you need" still applies, but the form this takes now is the difference between buying, say, a decently peppy single- or dual-core notebook vs. a riced-out quad-core desktop. Right now, for $599, I can get a Dell Studio 15, a dual-core widescreen notebook that sports far more than this -- except for maybe the HDMI connector, which is not reason alone to spend another $100 and lose a bunch of other features.

So why does the Litl cost so much? I suspect at least some of the cost of the device helps subsidize the software development, but also helps pay for the cloud storage backend it's been created to talk to and get updates from. The business model has me hearkening back to the Kindle, whose initially-hefty pricetag was not for the sake offsetting the cost of the hardware but for a lifetime's worth of wireless connectivity.

Thing is, from what I can tell the Litl doesn't come with its own connectivity (the demo movie shows a connection to an existing home wireless network), so you still have to supply your own wireless anyway.

The one other thing that seems interesting is how the Litl merges what they call the "lean-forward" (PC) and "lean-back" (TV) experiences. But, again, given the pricetag for this thing, I'm not sure that's going to offer people anything they don't already have in a more immediately useful form.

Open source usage aside, unless there is some major bit of magic about the Litl that I haven't picked up on yet, it's going to end up being a solution to a problem that only exists in the minds of its engineers.

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