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"Extra zeros on Amazon.com's listing for a ViewSonic Tablet PC drew a blizzard of bogus "buyer" reviews of a system so powerful that one claimed "the singularity used to power this device is unstable" and another wrote "I was able to create my own flux capacitor to travel back in time."

Although the listing's technical details have been corrected -- and the page claims that the ViewSonic TPCV1250S-1303 "is currently not available" -- for a while Wednesday and Thursday, Amazon had the Tablet PC's AMD processor as a "10.0 GHz" Athlon and its hard drive as a "30,000 GB" IDE model (3 terabytes).

All for the low, low price of $2,200.

Buyers noticed the extra digits -- the actual speed of the tablet's AMD chip is 1.0GHz, and the hard drive holds 30M -- and immediately began using Amazon's Customer Review feature to post tongue-in-cheek reviews.

A small sampling of the more than 80 "reviews" posted so far:

"I hooked up my scanner to this beast and now there are two of me.... and my copy (no - really - the COPY) is getting me into all kinds of trouble."

"I wasn't home when they turned it on, which Mommy said was a good thing, after she stopped crying yesterday. I saw the flash of light from my school several blocks away. Our neighbor's house was burned pretty bad and I wondered where our house went -- there was just a big hole in the ground. Mommy said something about suing ViewSonic for not using a big enough heat sink. I just want my sister Suzie back."

"This item ships from the future. It requires an additional charge of 7,000 Earth Barter Notes. An EBN is roughly equal to $60. It is SO worth it, though."

"We have been using one of these at work for the basis of our SKYNET project. We are so impressed by this hardware that we plan on switching over the nation's defense grid to be under complete control of this machine sometime next week. I'll post a follow-up review after we do to tell you how it went..."

Tech Web

Posted by | Fri, Mar 25, 2005 - 06:31 AM