Another pretender to the Eee PC’s low-cost throne emerges, but this time with a few twists. If you're after a cheap laptop, keep an eye out for this.
- new mini laptop with 8.9" screen
- USB-only (no hard drive)
- Onboard Linux (type TBA)
Asus must be feeling flattered right about now, specifically in reference to its low-cost (and highly popular) Eee PC platform; while the company has been busy adding a Windows XP preloaded variant and announcing a larger screen version, the competition is busy bringing similar platforms to market – or at least announcing them. The latest pretender to the throne comes from Emtec, who will be distributing the French-developed Gdium (like Sodium with less sod and more “Gee”, presumably) PC in June.
The Gdium’s specifications read as an interesting mix of aping what’s made the Eee successful, along with a few new twists along the way. The display is an 8.9” (22.6cm) 1024x600 panel – similar to the yet to be released second generation 900 Series Eee – running on a 1Ghz processor. Where the new Eee will use Intel’s low-power Atom processors, the Gdium will instead use a Chinese-developed Longsoon 2F processor. Graphics are provided by Silicon Motion’s SM502 chipset. The combination of low-power CPU and graphics chip gives the Gdium a claimed battery life of three hours.
Memory at this stage is quoted at 512MB, but the Gdium’s storage arrangement is a curious one. Instead of internal memory bolstered by the presence of USB slots, the Gdium is a USB-only beast, with supplied 4GB “GKey” – most likely just a regular USB Flash Key with the seventh letter of the Alphabet adorned on it, although that is just a guess – that holds vital data. It’s an unusual approach; on the one side it does offer some future-proofing, as it would be easy to “upgrade” the Gdium’s storage as larger flash drives become cheaper in the future. At the same time, we’re not sure what would happen if you lost your Gkey in terms of the operating system, and as not all Flash drives are made equally, we’re wary about how many write cycles you could get away with on the Gdium – and thus how long its operational life might be.
The Gdium runs on a Linux platform, although at this juncture it’s not clear which Linux variant will be used or modified. The Longsoon 2F processor runs the MIPS command set rather than x86, meaning that a Windows version of the Gdium is pretty much out of the question. The rest of the Gdium’s specifications ape the Eee fairly closely; a 300k Webcam, SD/MMC card reader, 10/100 Ethernet and 802.11b/g WiFi.