WEBMASTER GROUP

Everex, the same company that recently released the $200 gOS Linux based laptop to Wal-Mart, today announced its little brother, the Everex CloudBook ultra-mobile PC.

Weighing in at just 2 pounds, the CloudBook certainly lives up to its near-weightless name. It features a VIA C7-M ultra-low voltage (ULV) CPU clocked at 1.2GHz, which helps achieve its 5 hour battery life on a 4-cell battery. By way of comparison, the Asus EeePC has a 900MHz Intel Celeron processor.

Everex’s CloudBook features the same 7 inch 800×480 resolution screen as the Eee PC, similar built-in speakers, and 802.11b/g that the Asus Eee PC 701 has, but instead of packing in a measly 4GB SSD, Everex has opted for a full-blown 30GB hard drive. It’s an awesome feature that media-heavy users are looking for, although it will most certainly boot slower than the Eee PC. The CloudBook also has a 4-in-1 card reader, as opposed to just a SD/MMC one, and a better 1.3 MP webcam. Unfortunately, Everex only packs in 512MB of DDR2 RAM, and it can only be upgraded to 1GB.

Instead of a Xandros Linux distribution, the CloudBook has the same gOS V2 Rocket distro that the Everex desktop has. It features pre-installed apps like Skype, Firefox, Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Maps, and OpenOffice.org 2.3, among others. Size-wise, the CloudBook measures about the same as the EeePC: 9.06 x 6.73 x 1.16 inches as opposed to 8.9 x 6.5 x 1.4 inches.The black faceted unit looks pretty attractive in our pictures, and we admit, it’s going to take a lot of will-power to hold back from grabbing one on January 25th when it hits store shelves for $399.

(laptopmag.com)