Hands-On With One Different Type of Netbook: the EMTEC Gdium
January 10th, 2009 by Joanna Stern
Everyone and their mother want to sell netbooks. Just look at companies like Coby and Viewsonic unveiling netbooks here at CES. In their minds, creating a netbook is as simple as getting the right hardware together with a typical netbook processor (Intel Atom, VIA C7M) and then loading up Windows XP.
But EMTEC, a company better known for making USB drives, is shaking things up with its Gdium. Instead of the typical netbook specs, the Gdium doesn’t have a hard drive and boots off a USB key (called the G-Key) that plugs into the front of the netbook. G-Keys will be available in 8GB, 16GB and 32GB capacities and will come pre-packaged with the netbook.
Booting off of that USB stick won’t take you to a Windows XP operating system either. Instead you will find Gdium’s own Linux interface that is built on a Mandriva platform. We found the interface, which is a work in progress, to be really easy to follow.
The widget desktop has a large window with a tab style layout. Targeted at the education market, there are over 50 pre-loaded applications divided up into categories including, gaming and Internet. You can then put other widgets around the screen; the unit we were looking at had a picture viewer widget. Others will include a weather or email widget.

Also setting the Gdium apart is its specs. Sure it has a 10-inch 1024 x 600 resolution display and the typical netbook ports (2 USB additional USB ports in addition to the G-Key slot, SD card, VGA Out, Ethernet, Mic and headphone) but it is powered by 900 Mhz 64bits Loongson 2F processor and 512MB of RAM. With a 3-cell battery, the company claims that the netbook will get 4 hours of runtime.
We were impressed with this different netbook. At least until we heard that they predict a starting price of $399. For a netbook without a hard drive and lower volatage processor we were hoping to see this system in the $300 price range or even less. Hopefully EMTEC will lower the price point. Hit the video below for a detailed hands-on a very promising and non-cookie cutter netbook.
Also, Brad from Liliputing has a ton of information on the Gdium including the fact that you can put another OS on a USB stick and boot that instead.
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January 22nd, 2009 at 6:23 pm
If you’re going to skip the booting phase at least tell us how long it takes for it to load.