Think you got the best deal when you got your 2G Eee PC? Or perhaps your Astone-with-a-cellphone netbook? Well prepare to have your smugness dashed against the reality of China’s ever inventive PC manufacturers: the Jointech JL7100 is but a third of the price of the original price champ the 2G "Surf" Eee PC.

Of course there’s a catch – although the JL7100 emulates the looks of the original 7” Eee down to the power button on the hinge casing and all the connections, slots, and panels, Jointech made massive changes to what ultimately counts: the internals. Get this: the JL7100 has 64…MB of RAM. Storage is listed as “external – optional” from 1 to 8 GB, which presumable means you get to use an external USB drive to buff up your $99 wonder (roughly P4500 = 1/3 of P13500 of original 2G Surf Eee PC). The 7100 has a nominal 64….MB of internal storage, which means you can probably store all of your cellphones contact details on it and not much of anything else.

Then again, the JL7100 is essentially a celphone, or at least a “handheld device”, when it comes to its O.S. choice – Windows CE 5.0. It also employs a Samsung chipset, also presumably something meant for a smaller handheld device. This is all indicative of the JL7100 being a simple portable device with laptop aspirations, albeit one with a 7-inch screen and a mini-laptop form factor. In other words, sure it looks like a laptop, but it costs only as much as Nokia’s lowest end cellphone.

And for that money, you get exactly that much capability, and not much more. This rip-off (yes let’s not mince words, something that looks exactly like a popular product currently on sale is a rip-off) will work handsomely for what it is supposed to do, and that is to work as a largish and under-powered PDA, so don’t be misled by how it looks – it may be slower than a tortoise in a mud shower.

                                             A page from the downloadable brochure of the JL7100.

On the positive side, if Jointech produces something that doesn’t look like a competitor’s laptop, and retains the form factor, plus retains the price, and finally makes no bones about what it actually is (and not what it’s trying to be), this kind of product may have great potential – in the same way as how the Eee PC opened up a niche market with a previously ignored sub-$300 market segment. Who knows – perhaps the next step in Jointech’s emulation of the Eee PC will be the droves of people who suddenly discover they only need 64MB’s worth of RAM to perform most of their daily requirements, especially considering the price – especially if that figure proves to be upgradeable and other undisclosed details (like “how fast is that Samsung proc?”) gets revealed. Watch out for more in these pages.