CES Sneak Peeks: Classmate PC, 60 GB for the Road Warrior
Includes XP w/Stylus
By John Ghysels, Special to Technology-Report.com
Sometimes it pays to manufacture chips and the surrounding hardware feeding input into those chips. Intel is proving this by diving into select portions of the PC market with this low cost, netbook class, convertible PC it will soon be introducting at CES next month. We’ve never seen such a cheap, flexible machine before with such power and it could be a real show stopper in Vegas. Although branded obviously for the student market, it promises to bring portable power to anyone.
This Classmate PC has an 8.9-inch swivel screen with touch and stylus input, a Web cam, and 1.6 GHz Intel Atom processor, 60GB hard drive running Windows XP, with a few Intel touches to make XP work for the convertible form factor. It includes Vision Objects Pen Input, which makes anything input via the stylus editable as text. It also includes a virtual keyboard, for when operating in pad mode.
Note that this model has far more memory and power than the original Classmate PC, which will continue to be sold.
Technology-Report has been told that the rumored price for this tiny, convertible Classmate PC will be somewhere around $250 to maybe $400, though the company declines to put a specific number out there just yet. Guess we have to wait to bug the reps at CES.
John Ghysels, 12/20/2008
This was the one I wanted to get for daughter but not out in time. Anxious to see this working at CES as it seems to be one of the best of the new bunch of low priced small PCs