A New York Times article on Thursday tipped me off to a new handheld PC called the Everun from Raon Digital of Korea.
Although this machine has apparently been around for over a month, this was the first I'd heard of it. The occasion for the Times' mention was that the Everun is now available from Dynamism, a company that has become a hero to the early-adopter crowd by importing all kinds of gizmos that aren't officially for sale in the US market. If you haven't been to Dynamism, go check it out, it's great.
The Everun is much smaller than most Ultra-Mobile PCs; it's in the size class of the OQO and Flipstart machines. But it's much less expensive than those machines.
Flipstart offers a 1.1GHz Pentium M and 3D graphics on a 1,024 x 600-pixel LCD in its 1.5-pound system, which sells for $1,999.
OQO can provide a 1.5GHz VIA C7M and limited 3D on an 800 x 480-pixel LCD in a sub-1 pound machine for $1,699.
Raon's Everun is available with a 600MHz AMD Geode LX 900 processor, the display also displays 800 x 480 pixels (in 2D only), but Dynamism's price is only $1,099 for the best configuration, which weighs only 1.1 pounds. The base 500MHz system is just $799.
But here's what I like most about the $1,099 model-- it comes with both a 60GB conventional hard disk and a 6GB flash drive! In a handheld device!
So when I suggested two weeks ago (here) that it would be good to provide both kinds of drives in a notebook PC, I had no idea someone was already doing that in a much smaller system. Kudos to Raon for taking this step ahead of all the other PC OEMs in the world.