The guys at Everex failed in launching the $399 sub-notebook on time, partly because they had to perform additional tweaks to the Linux interface and partly because the Chinese New Year's Eve rushed uninvited and shut the factories down for a week.

The "regular" CloudBook ultra-mobile PCs will start shipping on February 15th and will run on a VIA platform with some additional help from the Ubuntu-based gOS Linux distribution. However, the failed launch did not prevent the Everex crew from dreaming about bigger, more powerful and more appealing units.

The actual version looks quite appealing and it will give the Eee PC a hard time on the market, especially now, as Asustek is extremely silent about the more powerful versions that are alleged to be in the works. However, according to Everex's Director of Marketing, Paul C. Kim, comparing the Cloudbook with the Eee PC is a little unfair for the latter, since the Cloudbook comes with more "generous" hardware specifications, such as the 30GB miniature hard-disk drive.

Kim would also offer some other juicy details about the upcoming versions of the Cloudbook. For instance, the Cloudbook laptop will be available in a wide palette of colors. Next on the roadmap, the Cloudbooks will feature bigger LCD screens (see the pattern here?) to allow users run either Windows XP or even Windows Vista at more decent screen resolutions.

Everex also plans to release a touch-screen based Cloudbook PC model in the third quarter of the year. Again, it seems to me that the Everex team is following the Eee's footsteps, but a tablet version could be trickier than it may seem at the first glance. Let's not forget that 7- or even 9-inch touchscreens are not only expensive, but also rare, since professional tablets use wider displays. Asustek, for instance, called quits on their 10-inch touch-screen device, and I strongly doubt that Everex will get more successful.

Oh, boy, these are quite some plans for a company that didn't even manage to release their product on time, but I've seen even bigger delays. However, the second and the third quarters of the year will stay under the sign of UMPCs, so the guys at Everex would need all the luck in the world.