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Cloudbook rejects Windows for gOS, as Everex goes ultramobile with VIA Nanobook

It's certainly tinier than the One Laptop Per Child; the ultra-portable originally described as the "Nanobook" by VIA has now appeared at Last Vegas CES as the Cloudbook, branded by Everex. And the question you're asking has a simple answer: five hours.

The Nanobook was unveiled as a reference design in June, using VIA's lowest-power processor, and (equally important) quite a small display (7 inch diagonal). As with all ultra-portables, you pay for the lower power consumption in fewer pixels: 800 by 400.

The same box was badged by Packard Bell as the Easynote back in October, and that is still being flagged as coming soon on their web site.

But the Packard Bell machine runs Windows XP Home.

By contrast, the new Everex Cloudbook isn't a Windows box. Instead it uses the gOS Rocket OS - a variant of Ubuntu (a Linux distribution remarkable for its simplicity).

This isn't as much of an experiment as it sounds; WalMart launched a desktop "green PC" based on this OS (and the same chip set) in November last year - and it was reported a success.

The software preinstalled includes the gOS version of Mozilla FireFox, gMail, Meebo, Skype, Google Documents & Spreadsheets, Google Calendar, Google News, Google Maps, Wikipedia, Google Product Search, GIMP, Blogger, YouTube, Xine Movie Player, RhythmBox, Faqly, Facebook and OpenOffice.org 2.3 (includes WRITER, IMPRESS, MATH, DRAW), according to Everex's official announcement today.

Price was announced as $399 (200 pounds sterling) for the model CE1200V and availability through WalMart should be from January 25th.