Not content with mounting a serious challenge to Asus' elfin Eee PC, US manufacturer Everex this week said it will follow up its 7in CloudBook sub-notebook with larger models later in the year.

To be fair, these are all enhancements Asus has already pledged to make to the Eee PC line-up. At the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), it announced it would release 8in and 9in notebooks Eees later this year. In November 2007, it promised this year will see a desktop version.

Everex's CloudBook: aka Packard Bell EasyNote XS20, aka Belinea s.book

So Everex - owned by Taiwanese manufacturer First International (FIC) - is really just playing catch-up. So are other Taiwanese companies, with the likes of Acer, Gigabyte and others hinting they're going to be tackling the low-cost laptop and ultra-cheap desktop markets in 2008. Many of these products will be based on Intel's 'Shelton' platform.

Everex's first CloudBook, the CE1200V, will go on sale in the States on 25 January for an Eee-matching $399. Like the Eee, the CloudBook comes with a 7in, 800 x 480 display, 512MB of DDR 2 memory and a version of Linux pre-installed, but it also packs in 30GB of HDD storage and a VIA C7-M processor rated at 1.2GHz. The Eee's 900MHz Intel Celeron M chip actually runs at 630MHz.

Everex also has a desktop version in the works, the gPC mini, annouced at CES last week.

According to a Computerworld report, the 9in CloudBook may be called the DevBook and will incorporate a touchscreen display. It too will run the Linux-derived gOS and be priced at $400-500. The target audience: Linux software developers.

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