Intel unveiled a new design of the Intel-powered classmate PC today at the Intel Developer Forum in Shanghai. As announced in a keynote by Andrew Chien, Intel vice president, Corporate Technology Group and director of Intel Research, the second-generation Intel-powered classmate PC is an affordable, fully functional, rugged Internet-centric computer platform. These simple-to-use PCs have wireless capability, longer battery life, water resistant keyboards and are more shock resistant if dropped. Intel is calling this category of PCs “netbooks.” (more…)

Asustek launched today the “desktop Eee PC”, called Nova Lite minidesktop, one of the smallest such desktop replacement products. The PC has Core 2 Duo processors, 2 GB of RAM, ATI RV 620 LE, hard-disk with 160 GB. NOVA LITE Mini 2L PC is very quiet, just 24 decibels. (more…)

Colleagues at The Register believe they found a Desktop Eee PC from Asus. It’s called Digital Home System EP20 (pics) and it looks great. Seems to be running on Linux.

Sony’s Mike Abary says in an interview, ‘If [Asus's Eee PC] starts to do well, we are all in trouble.‘ Presumably by ‘we’ he means all the hardware manufacturers who sell over-priced, full-fat laptops. I say it’s time to put an end to the $3000 light laptop monopoly.

Shortly after Blog4it wrote how Diamondville processor breaks the multi-core strategy of Intel, sources in the company tell PCWorld that a dual core cheap processor is in development. Diamondville dual-core will help cheap small laptops get event better at performance. (more…)

The unfortunately-named Linpus released it’s Linux Lite OS, which it says will run just fine on laptops like the Eee PC and Cloudbook, or any other system with as little as a 500MHz CPU, 128MB of RAM and 512MB of storage. (more…)

Obviouslly, Consumer Electronic Show 2008 will have tens of thousands new products on display. But, inspite some rumours, nothing will be so spectacular. Not even the 3G iPhone, wich will be shown later this year. Some 2,700 exhibitors are getting their booths ready for tomorrow. Remember! This year the doors are closed to the public and the show is “invitation only”! (more…)

Today I had the chance to see and touch the Asus Eee PC, wich is by far not an OLPC laptop, but a small, light, sub-notebook that will be used by professionals more than teachers and scholars. It’s all you need for mobile computing and cheaper than any other product, including Nokia N800 tablet, Flybook, MacBooks or even cheap Asus laptops for that matter. It has Linux preinstalled and you can switch to Windows XP if you want. (more…)