The son of Sun

Johannesburg, 04 Oct 2001

The Sun Blade 100 is a peculiar beast. On the one hand it looks something like, and is marketed as, a direct competitor to the desktop PC. On the other, it is more like a high-end operating system squashed into a desktop model with most of the bells and whistles often found on a server system. Exactly where it fits into the desktop market is anyone`s guess.

Straight out of the box, the Sun Blade is a heavy piece of equipment and its horizontal CPU case brings back memories of those early IBM machines that took up most of the desk space available. Of course, being a Sun machine, the case comes in regulation purple. The extended keyboard includes all the additional buttons one expects to find on a Sun machine as well as a purple palm rest and Sun branded mouse. The keyboard felt a bit harsh with a resounding "clack" in response to each and every keystroke.

Under the hood

In theory, the Sun Blade is a heavyweight machine. The 64-bit UltraSPARC processor and the 128MB of memory should make for a speedy beast, a fact not all that obvious when doing standard desktop operations. Perhaps the full extent of the processing power comes through when processing high volumes of traffic, but as a workstation the primary tasks would involve the stop/start type of work of office applications. While by no means sluggish at these tasks, the promised power of the Sun Blade was not immediately obvious.

When it comes to productivity applications, the Sun Blade, unsurprisingly, includes Sun`s own StarOffice suite, which should be more than adequate for most users. Interestingly, Sun now also includes Netscape Navigator with the Sun Blade for Internet browsing.

The standard CDE graphical interface is functional, yet uninspired. While it does the job at hand, it does it in a highly functional manner with very few of the bells and whistles most desktop users have come to expect from their machines. And, to be honest, while CDE does some of the required tasks, it in no way represents the full power of the machine. As with most Unix-based machines, the true strength of the system lies in the command line and terminal windows.

Using the Solaris 8 environment (including Sun OS 5.8) the Sun Blade has hidden beneath its CDE shell all the tools one expects of a full-blown server standard system. And it is through the command line that most of the true configuration takes place. The rudimentary CDE menus, despite promising options to configure things such as networking, barely scrapes the surface and most users will find themselves permanently working in a terminal window.

Which brings me to the major contradiction of the machine: The Unix-based Solaris system is not for the faint-hearted. Even if you`re accustomed to something like Linux or one of the BSD flavours, you`ll still find Solaris a bit of a learning curve if you haven`t had previous Unix experience. Sun, however, brands this as its option to take on the desktop PC market, a market not usually expected to have Unix-level skills, making it something of a misplaced beast.

The Sun Blade is probably best suited to the server room or a large corporation running a predominantly Sun environment. But I doubt very much that the average small business or home user is about to turf out a Windows machine for a Sun Blade.

The son of Sun

Sun Microsystems launches an assault on the lower end of the PC market with the Sun Blade 100 but fails to inspire.

Under the hood