Another cheap mini-portable...competition rocks

Everex looks to be the latest to join the ranks of companies offering Ultra-Mobile PCs (UMPCs) at prices educational institutions can afford. While final details will be released early in the year, both Linuxdevices.com and engadget picked up on this device. The 7" mini-portable is slated to run the gOS found in Walmart's popular $200 desktop, and will be called the "Cloudbook" due to the gOS emphasis on cloud computing via Google Apps.

$400 dollars (the same price as the ASUS Eee) will buy you a 30GB hard drive (no solid state option exists yet, reducing durability, but drastically increasing storage space), half a gig of RAM, a flash card reader, USB ports, a DVI port, a 1.2GHz ultra-low voltage Via processor, and wired/wireless Ethernet. The gOS itself is a tweaked Ubuntu distribution with a fair amount of integration with Google Apps. It remains to be seen if a touchscreen or an integrated mouse device of some sort will be included (though not pictured in the photo from Everex). While $400 isn't exactly loose pocket change, small devices focused on providing web connectivity and basic productivity in cheap, highly portable packages should be welcome news for educators looking at innovative 1:1 solutions or inexpensive portables for staff.