--[Before the EEE we've seen lots of really nice looking UMPCs like the Sony's and the OQO's and others, where the pundits were impressed but real sales were pretty pathetic.]--

That's probably because Sony's attempts at ultra-mobile devices all cost about 15 billion dollars.

You took a picture of the EeePC 701 at the Netbook booth, didn't you... did you notice that all the other systems had an "Atom" sticker, but this one didn't? It seems that Asus couldn't get an EeePC 900 to IDF, and so Intel showed off the old one... oops.

I think Intel's pretty lucky that the EEE PC came out when it did, and that it's shown that an (almost) UMPC can be successful. Before the EEE we've seen lots of really nice looking UMPCs like the Sony's and the OQO's and others, where the pundits were impressed but real sales were pretty pathetic.

It's not like the current iteration of the Atom family has too many other market segments it can compete in anyway, its power usage is still too high to take on the entrenched ARM crowd where the big volume lies.

The article says that the Atom based UMPC will likely cost more than the existing Celeron version, but doesn't the top Atom package at $160 cost the same as the old EEE PCs 933 MHz ULV Celeron, with the Atom price including the chipset as well?

I don't like this game...