NorhTec's last attempt at a super-cheap laptop hasn't exactly rocked many peoples' boats -- with its 7-inch display surrounded by the king of all bezels and a $300 price, you don't have to spend much more to get a lot more netbook. Word on the 'net is, though, that there's a new Gecko EduBook on the way, set for debut at Computex and moving up to a netbook-standard 8.9-inch, 1024 x 768 600 LED-backlit screen while also dropping to a sub-$200 price point. That's possible thanks to a new architecture based on an Xcore86 system on a chip, offering a 1GHz processor and power consumption of just 1.2 watts, equating to four hours of battery life on eight NiMH AA batteries or six hours if Li-on cells are used. Full specs are at the read link, a demonstration video below, and, while this little lappy is still far from a powerhouse, it certainly looks a lot more appealing than its predecessor -- and some other low-cost alternatives.

Update: Michael Barnes from NorhTech wrote in to clarify the history of these and the pricing a bit. The EduBook is completely modular and if you happen to be a small country looking to make a large order you can configure these for well under $150, but for the rest of us individual units should be available in the $195 range. Additionally, more models are on the way, including a 10-inch netbook and even a nettop.

[Warning: PDF read link]

Most modern hobbyist robots (those that aren't giant beetles) are just collections of servos plumbed together, shipping with controllers accessed cloaked in proprietary programming environments. They make it easy to get up to speed, but for full control in a standardized dev environment like Visual Studio you want something like the £175.00 ($255) Roboard RB-100. It's built around a Vortex86DX system on a chip, capable of running various flavors of Windows (including XP and CE) or x86 Linux distros -- probably even OSX or Android -- and offering connections for 24 servos, USB, audio, a MicroSD reader, and even a Mini PCI slot. A few builders at the Robosavvy forums have been working with early boards for a few weeks now and one, ATebay, has found they mount easily to various bots, including his creation above that looks something like an armor-less Wolf Clan Mad Cat ready to conquer the Inner Sphere. Detail pic of the board and obligatory robot dancing video after the break.

NVIDIA is launching a full-frontal assault on Intel, its burgeoning MID market, and smartphone makers with its forthcoming "mobile computer on a chip" architecture, dubbed Tegra. We've shown you snippets of what this would look like before, but plans are now well underway to take this technology mainstream, with numerous partnerships, and products planned for Q4 2008 and Q1 / Q2 2009. We had a chat with the company, and we've got a slew of info about the chips and their intended products after the break.

Update: We've added some videos from World Mobile Congress showing off the UI.

Intel may have sold its mobile chip unit to Marvell, but it seems that the company hasn't entirely given up on the mobile biz, with the company recently detailing plans for an x86-based system-on-a-chip. According to HKEPC Hardware, the so-called 'Tolapai' unit will be based on Pentium M architecture, and pack 256KB of L2 cache and support for DDR 2 memory, along with a full compliment of integrated connectivity options, including PCI Express, USB, SATA, Gigabit Ethernet, RS-232 and a cellular link, among other goodies. The initial lineup will apparently come in 600, 1,066 and 1,200MHz varieties to start with, boasting a power consumption of 13-22W, and support for Linux, FreeBSD, and Windows XP Embedded on the OS front. While Intel will first be aiming the system-on-a-chip at embedded applications, as Reg Hardware speculates, it would seem to be just as applicable to handhelds and other mobile devices in need of a little more power. What's not so clear, unfortunately, is when we might actually see a device running on the thing, although the system-on-a-chip itself will supposedly be ready by the end of the year.

[Via Reg Hardware]