Asustek firms up Classmate PC plans, prices starting at $249

While we already knew that Asustek was planing to build some low-cost laptops based on Intel's Classmate PC platform (the reference design of which seen above), we didn't quite have a complete picture of exactly what the company had in store. Asustek's now clearing things up a bit further, however, revealing that the systems will in fact be sold under the Asus brand, with production set to begin in July. Unfortunately, it looks like they won't come in at the $199 price point we heard earlier, instead starting at $249 and going all the way up to $549 (with four different models falling in that range). Not so clear, however, is how far each of those will vary from Intel's reference design, which centers around a 7-inch LCD, Celeron M 900 processor, and a mere 256MB of RAM.