Everex Announces Cloudbook with 9-inch LCD and Devbook with Touch Screen

by atticus ~ January 20, 2008

While the Cloudbook with a 7-inch LCD has yet to reach the market, Everex is already talking about its successor - a Cloudbook with a 9-inch LCD. According to Paul Kim, director of marketing at Everex in Fremont, California, the 9-inch Cloudbook is planned to be released by June 2008. The new Cloudbook will feature a larger keyboard and possibly, more memory and greater storage. Another possibility is the availability of skins, which is a welcome change, since the 7-inch Cloudbook comes in only one colour - black.

How about a solid-state hard drive for the Cloudbook? According to Kim, it depends on how fast the prices of solid-state hard drives would fall. But he added that a Cloudbook with a solid-state hard drive could become available by December 2008.

It appears to us that these moves are targeted at the Asus Eee UMPC. The Eee comes in a myriad of colours and boasts a solid-state hard drive. Asus has also recently announced that upcoming Eee models will come with a larger LCD. Matching specification by specification, the Everex Cloudbook looks set to become a serious contender in the niche UMPC market, an area currently dominated by the Asus Eee UMPC.

But Everex decided to up the ante, by announcing a developer’s version of the Cloudbook. Tentatively called Devbook, the new model boasts a touch screen and a removable side module. The side module, where the webcam is located in the 7-inch Cloudbook, can be a swappable Bluetooth VoIP phone, GPS or world clock etc. These features do not really come as a surprise, as the Via Nanobook reference design has already listed such specifications. The devbook is due out by end of March 2008 and expected to cost between US$400 to US$500.