14 DAY TRIAL // Once upon a time, when Nintendo NES game systems were all the rave, someone got the idea of creating a joystick that had all the system parts included. Those things never really took off, but maybe mouse PCs will.
That is the hope of Przemysław Strzelczyk, a software engineer at Nokia Networks who not only decided to dabble in hardware but to do it in a unique fashion.
What he did was take a mouse and stuff it with everything that makes a PC a PC, from the processor and storage to the I/O.
The new mouse PC is called “The Mouse-Box” and will be very cheap once it becomes available globally. Not that any hint is given as to what “very cheap” actually means.
The Mouse-Box specifications
In truth, the invention is not as shocking as it would have been just a few years ago. After the Raspberry Pi was released in February 2012, efforts to release miniature versions of all other types of PCs have been feverish.
Most of them failed to become as small as a credit card, but recent inventions have gotten quite close, like the MintBox Mini that is only larger because it has a case.
The Mouse-Box has a 1.4 GHz ARM processor at the center, both literally and figuratively. The chip is right in the middle of the PCB (printed circuit board).
Around it are arranged all the other semiconductors, like the integrated circuits that run the I/O ports, but most importantly, the 128 GB of NAND Flash storage space.
Speaking of I/O, Strzelczyk was able to install two USB 3.0 connectors, and an HDMI port, all of them on the front, understandably enough.
It will be somewhat awkward to link both a display and a keyboard to the device, but if you can buy a Wi-Fi wireless keyboard instead of a USB one, you can do away with that hassle.
Unfortunately, this would cut the PC off from the Internet, which is never good, so you'll have to make do with a cable model. Other features include a gyroscope and an accelerometer.
Availability and pricing
As we implied previously, Przemysław Strzelczyk did not say what price the Mouse-Box would sport, or when sales would begin. Hopefully “very cheap” means around fifty bucks or so, no more.
