Intel plans PCs for Chinese Internet cafes

While most eyes were focused on that
other Chinese PC deal, Intel has quietly announced that they've designed a new PC for China's Internet cafes. The "Christea," developed in Intel's Shanghai office, is a stripped-down box that, among other things, will include technology to make it harder for errant users to swipe components, but it isn't known exactly who will build these yet. We can understand why Intel would want a chunk of China's Internet cafe market, given that the country has some hundreds of thousands of them, filled with millions of PCs rented on an hourly basis by gamers and Web surfers. Let's just hope the venture fares better than Intel's last efforts at a bare-bones PC, the ill-fated (and really poorly named) Dot.Station, an information appliance for ISPs that the company scrapped in 2001, about a year after its introduction.