Whoa, big day in the land of low-cost ultra-portables. First Dell, now Acer in what appear to be the first shots of Acer’s first sub-$500 ultra-portable. The images above were dumped into the forum over at UMPC Portal and show what appears to be an “Aspire One” branding to the right of the touchpad and what could certainly pass as the rumored 8.9-inch display. And although that UI is very un-Microsoft, there’s no denying the Microsoft flag waving back from the keyboard. We’ll know for sure if this is Acer’s contestant in the race to the bottom next week at Computex.

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Taipei (Taiwan) – TG Daily got its hands on Asus’ latest entry-level notebook, the Intel Atom-based EeePC 901. We were left with mixed feelings after seeing and playing with the device for a while. The processing and graphics capability is entry-level without any doubt, while the Eee PC 901’s price has arrived deep in mainstream territory.

 

The Eee PC has made quite some waves and some believe that it even resembles what the OLPC XO should have been, at least in terms of its market appeal and success. In Taipei we came across the Intel Atom-based Eee PC 901, which ran on an Atom Z520 processor, clocked at 1.33 GHz and rated at a maximum power consumption of 2 Watts (average power: 220 mWatts).

 

The unit also included Intel’s 130 nm integrated graphics chipset called SCH (“System Controller Hub”), which, however, left us unimpressed. The device we saw delivered choppy video playback on its 8.9” screen and convinced us that video is something you would not want to run on this device. But then, the Eee PC is really intended a cheap notebook. The power consumption during video playback, by the way, was 10 watts and we saw the power consumption max out at around 12 watts.

But wait: Cheap? We heard that the Windows XP version of the device with 20 GB of memory (4+16 GB) will sell for $649, while the Linux versions will come in at $549 or $599. By today’s standard, that is not really cheap anymore, especially, if you can purchase a generally much more capable notebook for the same price at your local electronics store.

The Eee PC 901 is scheduled to launch on Monday.

At least for now, we are not impressed.

By Theo Valich
TGDaily

We got to spend a little bit of time with a prototype of VIA’s new OpenBook reference design, and while it’s not going to revolutionize anything, VIA does seem to have a pretty good grasp on the balance of value, size and power necessary to compete in the subnotebook game. They were showing it off with Vista (though it will be available in XP and Linux versions as well), with an interface that was plenty responsive, and while the video we saw wasn’t an incredible display of multimedia showmanship, it was neat to see on the C7-M all the same. Our two main gripes are the seeming thickness of the device — 1.4-inches might be par for the course, but with this small of a laptop it seems awkwardly thick — and the itty-bitty, cheap-looking keyboard that doesn’t utilize the whole width of the laptop. The hope with a reference design is that some manufacturer might even be able to improve on VIA’s version, and we’d say the first problem point to address is the keyboard. That said, we’re quite impressed that VIA’s crammed as much inside the OpenBook as it has, and perks like 3G / 4G connectivity, a trio of USB ports and a media card reader are making that MacBook Air look positively last century. Now the waiting game for one of the dozens of OEM types to start pumping these out of factories and into the arms of cherub-faced mini-note fans the world over.

Gallery: VIA OpenBook hands-on

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From engadget