For a DIY home automation or security system, these might be perfect. Say, USB webcams for a few camera modules, a USB hard disk for the DVR module, a keypad entry module at each door...

Wouldn't be any cheaper than a commercial security system but you could really customize the dickens out of it.

If this had 2 ethernet ports, it would be so much more useful. Then it could function as a router in addition to whatever else you are doing. A 2nd USB port, eSATA and firewire would also be nice, in that order.

Although these units are meant as reference devices, it came to mind that in quantity, you may be able to get them to a cost of around $70. They could be used as is, interfaced with other stand-alone networked sensors to integrate a neat little home or business security system.
Loaded with Ubuntu, a few motion detectors, and entry detectors, this device could use the linux SIP package to call security (police) once a security breach was detected, and even send an email alert to your cell or PDA. If you include camera's you could even be sent photos or video of the breach.

USB TV Tuner + software could deliver something equivalent to a slingbox.

i'm failing to see the point/application of this. it's not powerful enough to do very much and doesn't have much in the way of I/O interfaces. i see some USB and a flash card reader. the diagram shows a little box of some sort connected, any idea what that might be? hard drive maybe?

The unit is really meant as a reference platform. It has minimal functionality, and who would want to base a cluster on ARM.

I'll wait for the next version which will probably break out another ethernet port, another USB, and Audio. Then it could be used to connect to a projector for carrying to customer sites and giving presentations.
A Flash device could hold Ubuntu, office, and your foils. It could probably be easily run off a battery also.

This version, as is, could be used as an easy network interface/server for your HP USB printer/scanner/fax.

I just thought that this device really really should be able to make use of Power over Ethernet.

Look at the diagram in the gallery to see what the "intended usage" is envisioned as: They attach an external USB hard drive to the wall-wart for storage, and then connect the wall-wart to your home LAN. The sorts of things you can do with it are:

* Serve content to all your home computers
** Have your own webserver, FTP server, media streaming server
* Share files/photos/whatever between home computers and laptops

I think when you try to do more cool stuff (like hook it to a USB TV Tuner) you're going to run into a lot of issues unless Marvel has already designed for this. Well, at least you can run your IRC bot on it! :)

/me corners the market on all the permutations of cool bot names with "wart" in them :>

EDIT:
I had another thought: You could connect it to a USB cablemodem on one end and your Ethernet LAN on the other end and make a great firewall box that draws only 5W.

What other low-power uses can you think of? That's really where this thing could shine for enthusiasts. Low power + no noise + powerful enough to be an offline/idle-content server. So I've already got it running my IRC bot, my local Intranet wiki, my firewall, and I've connected it to an external on-demand-spinup USB hard drive. What else am I missing? Automated nightly backup? WINS/DNS server, streaming media server, pretty much everything the Netgear/Infrant ReadyNAS is, without the RAID?

The low price would make it marketable to end-users *if* great _usable_ software was out there for it.

But cahn it wrun krisus?

I must admit that I skimmed the title and stupidly misread it as Wal-Mart.

I read the title of the post as: "Marvell unveils $99 wall-mart Linux PC". As I read the article I thought to myself, "Man, there's going to be some disappointed Wal-Mart customers..."

Insert Obligatory "folding" comment here_______

No serial. The user had better not end up rendering the thing unbootable -- I'd expect once that happened it'd be particularly painful to get it up and running again without being able to access the firmware interface.

So... no pictures of the other side? Does this thing even have video output?

USB 3.0 will make this a lot sweeter as a cheapo NAS.

So what this needs is a pass-through power socket, and a provision for powerline ethernet. Then you could put one of these on every wall socket in your house -- instant distributed cluster.

Yeah, I don't know why either.

meant as a reply.....

This is the sweetest geekiest! I want one!

is that thing connected to the net via the router or is it connected to some Cloud based application? i like some others are failing to see the point of such a device...what does it do really?

Wow thats awesome. It does have a problem with storage space though. I think two eSATA ports would make it into a damned awesome little home web/file server.