During a brief moment of spare time during this weekend yours truly headed into a computer shop in Taipei to "waste some time". While browsing the wares in the shop, I happened upon something I didn't really expect to find, the Obama PC.

Although President Obama seems to have had his name put on just about everything these days, this was an unexpected find, especially this far away from the US. We can't say that we're overly impressed with the system itself and we very much doubt that President Obama would be either, especially as he seems to be quite fond of technology.

The Obama PC seems to be made by a local company called Seed which we've never heard of before and the specifications are pretty basic, as it features a mini-ITX motherboard with an Atom 230 processor, the Intel 945GC chipset, 2GB of RAM (not following the Microsoft specifications here), a 500GB SATA hard drive and a DVD writer. We didn't recognise the motherboard we saw through the cooling grates at the top of the system, as oddly enough, the motherboard is mounted above the optical drive.

Around the back the Obama PC has two PS/2 ports, a parallel port, a serial port, a D-sub connector, four USB 2.0 ports, a 10/100Mbit Ethernet port, three audio jacks and an available expansion slot for a single PCI card (mounted below the motherboard). As you can see from the picture it also has two front mounted USB 2.0 ports as well as two 3.5mm audio jacks for a headset. There's even a spare 3.5-inch drive bay for those looking ad adding a card reader or a second hard drive to the system.

This unusual little system retails for NT$7,999 which is about €178 (£162/$242), which seems quite affordable, but another €22 would buy you a Asus Eee Box in Taiwan, so the price isn't that great for what you get.