Intel Unveils New Line of Low-Cost Notebooks

Intel has once again picked up the hatchet against its small-scale rival One Laptop Per Child charity foundation by releasing into the wild a refurbished version of the Classmate PC. The update adds bigger screens and larger storage capacity to the company's educational notebook.

The new Classmate PC will hit the international markets in April for between $300 and $500. Available in both 7-inch and 9-inch LCD screen flavors, the new version of the sub-notebook is part of Intel's policy to spread notebooks powered by its own processors in the developing counties.

The notebook comes with 9-inch LCD screen, 6-cell battery, 512MB memory, a 30GB hard-disk drive, an integrated webcam and is powered by Intel's Celeron M processor. A new addition to the updated PC is the mesh networking capabilities, a feature that allows other users to connect directly to one another.

However, Intel has eliminated the US market from its potential customers list, where the OLPC foundation seems to have gained significant ground.

The ultra-mobile offering is just the beginning of a new breed of notebooks, called Nettops, a kind of machines that are to be used in an Internet-centric manner.

They are extremely miniaturized and pack less computing power than an average notebook, but their main purpose is to allow users to get online. Usually, Nettops are to be used as a second computer, to complete a desktop PC or a more powerful mobile solution.

According to its manufacturer, the Classmate PCs will soon come with Intel's Atom processor, that will significantly trim power consumption down and will bring a performance boost. More than that, the Atom series of processors are even cheaper to manufacture, which will bring Intel some extra revenue.

Intel has licensed multiple local PC vendors to customize and re-sell its Classmate architecture in a way to match the local market's requirements.