Sony eVilla

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Sony eVilla is a discontinued internet appliance from Sony. After 18 months of development, it was released to the public on June 14, 2001 for $499 USD. With the additional $21.95 USD monthly fee, users could access the Internet, send and receive e-mail, play audio and video, and save files to Sony's Memory Stick.

After less than two months in the market, Sony discontinued the product on September 13, 2001. Customers received full refunds for the product and the monthly subscription fee. Spokesman John Dolak remarked that "[the] product did not meet our expectations, it did not operate as planned."

Sony entered the internet appliance market as other manufacturers were getting out, canceling their plans, and discontinuing their offerings. By the time the Sony eVilla shipped, only 150,000 internet appliance devices had shipped within the past year. Also, many customers couldn't justify the purchase of an inherently limited internet appliance when other manufacturers were offering more capable personal computers for the same price.

1 Hardware and Software
2 Trivia
3 External links
4 References

[edit] Hardware and Software

Screenshot of the Sony eVilla interface.

The Sony eVilla is powered by a 266 MHz Geode GX 1 CPU, 64 MiB DRAM, and 24 MiB flash memory. It weighs 31.5 pounds (14.3 kg) and measures 11.81 × 16.18 × 15.82 inches (30 × 41.1 40.2 cm).

There is no hard disk, but the system can read and write to Memory Stick cards. The included keyboard and mouse are connected by two PS/2 ports, and additional devices can be connected with two USB ports. Also built-in is a 56K V.90 modem, and an unused Ethernet port.

The display is a portrait-style 15 inch (38 cm) Sony Trinitron, with 800×1024 pixel resolution.

The system uses the BeIA 1.0 operating system from Be_Inc. (who announced that they were going to sell all their assets, just before the eVilla was discontinued) and supports Java applications, Macromedia Flash animations, and some Microsoft Office file formats. Also included is RealNetworks's RealPlayer.

[edit] Trivia

The portrait-style display may have contributed to the eVilla's poor performance. It was a widescreen display mounted sideways, requiring the operating system to render the graphics vertically. Typically the pixels of a bitmap are stored sequentially by row, but the eVilla reads pixels column by column, which is much slower. [1]