French Medion Akoya Mini joins the Eee clones

A scant few months after Asus Eee forged the adorable market of the impulse-buy sub-notebook, it is already looking like the lame duck, a cheap Chinese knock-off of better competitors. As every computer maker crowds into this new market space, most of them seem to be bringing more attractive and full-featured offerings to the table for about the same price.

The Medion Akoya Mini is France's own prospective Eee-killer. It is shipping with a 1.6GHz-1.8Ghz Atom processor, apparently, with a gig of DDR2 RAM, which makes it a beefier machine than some of the cheap sub-notebooks we've seen recently. The OS will be either XP or Linux, but if you opt for Linux (as seems to be the trend) you get a beefier machine for the same price. There's also a 1.3 MegaPixel cam, a memory card reader, a VGA output, two USB ports and an Ethernet port. Release date is at the end of summer.

It's a pretty sleek looking machine, actually. Medion is claiming the price will be below €399 in Europe. I think we're soon going to see this cheap sub-notebook market become as over-saturated as the MP3, digicam or cell phone market with cheap, essentially indistinguishable devices.

Medion tells us more about its competitor of the Eee PC [SVM Le Mag via le Journal du Geek via Engadget]