Freescale-powered LimeBook hits eBay for astronomical price

China's Tsinghua Tongfang has had quite the difficulty launching any of its Lime-splashed gear here in the United States, and while it has bothered to show up at CES the past two years, we're still waiting for the LimePC UMPC and LimeBook netbook to arrive in proper fashion. Evidently, one eBay user reckons that Americans really will pay anything so long as something's considered "rare," as the Lime OS-packin' LimeBook -- which was spotted in January in Las Vegas -- is being offered up for US delivery at $500. Yeah, 500 smackers for an unproven, practically unheard of Freescale-powered netbook with a 9-inch display, 512MB of DDR2 RAM, a 32GB SSD, WiFi, 1.3 megapixel webcam and the Linux-based Lime OS. Anyone feel like burning through some discretionary income in order to let us know what the feeling of ownership is like?

[Thanks, Joseph]

[(Unverified) Posted Apr 7th 2009 8:37PM]

Mr. Tongfang, are you trying to sell me a lemon?

[blland Posted Apr 7th 2009 8:41PM]

Don't diss. It's on sale in parts of China for 1480 Yuan.

[(Unverified) Posted Apr 7th 2009 8:46PM]

the way this is written you would have though the asking price was 2000 dollars, but 500? Yeah its pretty high for the specs but nothing crazy.

[rclightboy197 Posted Apr 7th 2009 9:17PM]

yeah seriously

"astronomical"

=

$1,000,000,000 +, and that's hardly astronomical anymore

[sullivan504 Posted Apr 9th 2009 4:03PM]

For what it's worth, the seller has revised the asking price. It's currently $440 plus $19 shipping. Not something I plan to pay for, but not the worst sales pitch ever... I'll leave that to Steorn.

[(Unverified) Posted Apr 7th 2009 8:46PM]

Instead of buying this net-book, please donate to me.

[Wesley Posted Apr 7th 2009 8:46PM]

Someone from AIG can buy it and tell us how it is.

[(Unverified) Posted Apr 7th 2009 8:47PM]

Or you know, someone with 500 bucks?

[aarond12 Posted Apr 7th 2009 8:48PM]

I expect these ARM-based laptops to be around $200 by the summer. I wonder why they didn't put the new ARM-compiled Ubuntu on the laptop?

[aarond12 Posted Apr 7th 2009 8:50PM]

Oops. These are Power™ (PowerPC) based CPUs, you know, like the older model Macs. Still should run the PowerPC build of Ubuntu...

[spasewalkr Posted Apr 7th 2009 9:10PM]

LimeOS?! im losing track of all these Linux-based OS's. it's just too much for my little head.

:(

[(Unverified) Posted Apr 7th 2009 9:21PM]

I'm agreed with this statement. There are too many

[KR Posted Apr 7th 2009 9:20PM]

and i thought Engadget was in favor for overpriced computers with a fruit in its name.... hmm

[(Unverified) Posted Apr 7th 2009 9:32PM]

They don't like citrus.

[(Unverified) Posted Apr 8th 2009 11:07AM]

discretionary income?! What are you talking about? We are not the ones that spent 5k+ on a mac laptop....


N41

[(Unverified) Posted Apr 7th 2009 11:37PM]

Slap an apple on it and double the price and it will fly out the door.

[weirdo557 Posted Apr 8th 2009 12:30AM]

i've heard macs are impressive but now they can fly?!?! im sold.

[(Unverified) Posted Apr 8th 2009 3:39AM]

PowerPC CPU is perfect to use Amiga Operating Systems like AmigaOS 4.1 or MorphOS 2.2 !

I want one !!

[Altairantares Posted Apr 8th 2009 4:28AM]

Ebay has always had a penchant for terribly overpriceing terribly underpowered equipment...

[(Unverified) Posted Apr 8th 2009 11:31AM]

I bought it and I didn't like it SO I SMASHED IT TO BITS

[(Unverified) Posted Apr 8th 2009 5:40PM]

Well that seems like a waste of money, especially in this economy.

[(Unverified) Posted Apr 8th 2009 12:08PM]

The owner of the auction is speaking about it here:

http://amigaworld.net/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?mode=viewtopic&topic_id=28546&forum=2&start=0&viewmode=flat&order=0