Cut-price laptops coming forth

Updated If the now well-known $100 One Laptop per Child project appeals for its cheap-as-chips price, but you're not taken by the garish colour or crank-up handle, then you might consider the Medison Celebrity laptop, which retails for just $50 more.

The Celebrity doesn’t pretend to be an Alienware-esque ultimate gaming machine, rather Medison claims the machine is an everyday laptop for “e-mailing, surfing the Web, word processing and working with spreadsheet programmes”.

The $150 Medison Celebrity, hardly an A-list price-tag

The preinstalled OS is Linux Fedora from RedHat, presumably to keep the price down. It measures 33 x 24 x 2cm and weighs 2.2Kg - partly due to to the six cell Lithium-lion battery, and the 14in display sports a 1280 x 768 pixel resolution.

A respectable Intel 1.5GHz Celeron CPU hides under the hood, together with 256MB of memory (expandable up to 1GB) and 40GB hard drive. A CD/DVD drive is also included and wireless connectivity is provided over 802.11g.

Medison hasn’t skimped on the Celebrity’s connectivity interfaces either, with three USB 2.0 ports, one external CRT monitor output, separate headphone and microphone jacks, and one line-in jack, to name just a few.

The Medison Celebrity retails for around $150 (£73/€109) and will be available in Europe over the next four to six weeks.

Last year Chinese OEM ZhongKe Menglan Electronics began shipping a PC with its homegrown Godson CPU, 256MB of DDR memory, up to a 60GB hard drive and with a similar price tag of between $175 and $200.

Supplemental

A laptop for $150? Sounds too good to be true doesn’t it? Well, that's certainly what our readers seem to think. We've tried contacting them, but the folks at Medison have remained elusive.

But according to a statement from Medison that one website received, the company claims that the laptop is the real deal.

The statement says that manufacturer is aware of the ongoing debate over the authenticity of the laptop and ominously states that everything will be clarified really soon. The company apparently plans to arrange a press conference in Sweden in the next few days to address any doubts and questions regarding the laptop’s authenticity.

Register Hardware is hoping Medison will be passing out a few of the laptops for review after the press conference. In the meantime, you might want to think long and hard before shelling out for the machine.