The big ones are lining up for a piece of the, more or less, new niche market for budget laptops, which started with the Eee PC from ASUS. We recently heard about how Gigabyte was planning to launch a budget laptop based on Intel’s Basic Platform, a platform designed for highest mobility at the lowest possible cost. Back then we already knew that several manufacturers were interested in the platform and we’ve now had it confirmed that MSI is also working on an Eee PC competitor, which will use Intel’s Diamondville processor, the heart of the Intel Basic Platform.
There are no specific details surrounding MSI’s budget laptop, but it does say that MSI will have a laptop ready for when Intel announces the Diamondville CPU, which is expected to happen during Intel Developer Forum in Shanghai in April of this year.
There will most likely be more than a few new budget laptops coming in 2008 and we’re quite certain ASUS will be prepared a counter-attack with a successor to Eee PC.
