The Eee is indeed among the hottest gadgets this Christmas shopping season. But what about other alternatives (Eees are sold out in many places, after all). Here’s one: the Everex Cloudbook. According to Ubergizmo, it could make for good competition to the Eee.
This Linux-powered UMPC touts to follow the Eee PC in many aspects, featuring a 7″ display, a 1.3 megapixel webcam, wired and wireless Ethernet connectivity, a 4-in-1 memory card reader, 512MB RAM, USB 2.0 and DVI-out. It ditches the Eee PC’s solid state drive and 900MHz Celeron processor in favor of a 30GB hard drive and a 1.2GHz Via C7 ULV processor. The Everex Cloudbook is tipped to ship this January 15th, retailing for $400.
I’m sticking with my Eee. The use of a non-SSD hard drive would probably make the device heavier than the Eee (unless it’s a microdrive similar to those used by iPods). Still, the spinning disc would probably cause battery life to be a bit shorter, and would be more prone to damage from shocks and bumps (an uncommon occurrence for devices this portable).
And the unusual touchpad placement (top of the keyboard) is a bit unintuitive in terms of user interface and usability. That is at least, in my opinion.
