I got a chance to play with the Emtec Gdium for a few minutes last night at the ShowStoppers event in Vegas. And I have to say, it’s a nice looking little netbook with a unique design and a unique operating system. It’s launching first in Europe, and should be available in the US sometime around the second quarter of 2009.
I’ve discussed the Gdium before, but here’s a recap of the things that make this netbook unique.
- It has no hard drive or SSD. Instead, the operating system, program files, and any documents or other user data are all stored on a removable USB flash drive called a G-Key. They come in 8GB, 16GB, and 32GB sizes, and the idea is that you can have one computer and multiple G-keys, which makes this netbook ideal for schools, businesses, or any institution that may want to allow multiple people to use the same computer.
- The netbook uses a 900MHz MIPS-based Loongson processor, which means it ain’t going to run Windows anytime soon.
- The Gdium runs a custom version of Mandriva Linux which includes user-customizable widgets that can draw data from the internet including weather forecasts, email notifications, and RSS news feeds.
