Sun's Thin Clients: Heading for Home?

Talk about smart product placement. Sun Microsystems has donated a few dozen Sun Ray 270 thin clients for attendees to use at a major Avnet partner conference in Colorado Springs. The VAR Guy took one of the thin clients for a spin this morning. Not bad.

The thin clients included popular open source applications, including the Thunderbird E-mail client, StarOffice 8 and the Firefox web browser. Basically, the systems can fulfill all of the needs of a traditional office worker — without the hassle or expense of big, bloated operating systems and productivity applications.

Still, the Sun Ray 270s were a little slow, though The VAR Guy suspects a little more broadband would have gone a long way to solving the issue.

One big question on The VAR Guy’s mind: When are Sun, Wyse, Citrix and other thin client specialists going to realize there’s a consumer market waiting for thin clients? The VAR Guy is up to three PCs in his house. He’d welcome the opportunity to move his home network to a single Linux or Mac OS X box that supports several thin clients.