Gecube is entering the small and portable laptop market with its new Genie SR, expected to be available towards the end of 2008. It has a shiny black basket weave on the exterior finish and a nice form factor overall. With a 800x600 resolution screen it's a bit larger than many of the ones we've seen here. It also carries a 4GB NAND flash harddrive with 3 USB 2.0 ports.

Nothing fancy here until you look at the OS. It has a new OS called gOS. We suspect this follows their innovative naming from the GenieOS = gOS. What is interesting about this is that it is using a Via chipset - more on them later - with a slimmed down version of Linux. Almost every corner of Computex offers a small notebook with a slimmed down version of Linux as the main OS. A few offer the ability to put XP on it but those are limited as the drive size of most of these slimmed down subnotebooks.

Everyone has a different name for the subnotebooks, some easier to understand than others, and it merges categories when some offer a usefulness for everything except high level multimedia stuff and others offer a GPS and netsurfing ability much like an Iphone or a Blackberry but in a larger package.

Ubuntu seems to see the need for an OS that is pre-designed to deal with smaller memory and hard drive spaces on these subnotebooks. Intel and Canonical have partnered to sponsor the uptake of Ubuntu on the “emerging netbook” market. They are offering a pared down version of Ubuntu for OEMs and ODMs to place an operating system on mobile devices. It comes preloaded with a web browser, instant messenger, ebook reader, photo viewer, office suite, and a media player. They've licensed the codecs for mpeg4 (H.263) but not yet H.264 and also for mp3, aac, Windows media and Real media.

This makes excellent sense as the computer experience moves towards mobile devices having an OS that integrates well with other devices, is open to adaptation to different platforms and is small or lightweight allows the user to have more space to store their media and allows for a lower power device thereby increasing battery life.

This really is the next obvious step for subnotebook makers, mobile Internet devices and phone manufacturers. Especially when the system footprint is 2GB or thereabouts compared to 8GB with Vista. X