By Alex Villafania
INQUIRER.net

MANILA, Philippines — Laptop manufacturing firms from Taiwan are trying to outdo Asustek in the sub-notebook category. Some of them are trying to steer clear from being labeled “Eee PC wannabes” but far from being successful and that’s what they really are.

On the one hand, the Eee PC isn’t the first in the market but it was the one that truly set the standards with the sub-notebook genre with PC-like capabilities packed in a small frame. These features include wireless fidelity (wifi) support, Bluetooth, and the ability to run a power-hungry operating system with an underpowered processor. It also uses a solid state drive – a thumb drive chip, if you will, that is embedded inside a device no bigger than a school notebook.

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By Alex Villafania
INQUIRER.net

THE ULTRAMOBILE PC business is heating up as more hardware manufacturers are getting into the fray. Not to be outdone, computer manufacturer Red Fox and AMD have launched the Wizbook, which will compete with the Asus Eee PC (which technically is not a UMPC).

Although slightly bigger than the Eee PC, the Wizbook has a few features not present in the Eee PC, in particular a bigger hard disk, a larger LCD screen, and a PC card slot. Red Fox claims that it also has twice the battery life of the Eee PC.

But there are some features that are absent from the Wizbook, particularly an integrated web camera, an extra USB slot (the Eee PC has three whereas the Wizbook only has two), and a lower memory module.

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