Christoph, our Taipei spy who’s probably lost in some seedy downtown bar with a thousand other geeks by now, mentioned this to me at lunchtime as we had went over the VIA nanobook details. At first I thought it might have been the Intel educational UMPC 
that we’ve seen before (left) but it runs out that its a project with Asustek. There’s a press release that gives a few technical details (via Gizmodo) and a slightly more interesting story at the Inquirer which follows the lines of what Christoph heard in the Intel talk at Computex today.
The story is that this is aimed at the educational or emerging markets for an entry price of $199. technical details show that this is a very low end device (starting with 4GB flash, no HDD) and, according to Christoph, appeared to be running Linux. This might explain the ‘two modes of intuitive user interface’ statement in the press release because it then goes on to say ‘The Eee PC is also Windows XP compatible.’
With a battery life of 3hrs and a weight of 0.83kg I’m guessing there’s something like an old 600Mhz Pentium M inside. Newer CPU’s and chipsets would take the cost too high. Surely? And the price must be a bulk, trade, pre-tax possibly subsidized price for emerging markets. There’s no way you’re going to get that into a western market for $199.
Kohjinsha, T83 (no word of it at Computex yet), Nanobook and now Eee. The 7″ ultra mobile notebook market is hotting up.
