BenQ ‘JoyBook’ joins the netbook party

benqjoybook10

Laptop Magazine got their hands on BenQ’s offering to the netbook corral, the JoyBook, and found it to be pretty standard 10-inch fare with a few twists: 160GB hard drive, Windows XP, 1.5GB of RAM instead of 1GB, and apparently a full version of Office 2003.

The keyboard is a bit disappointing, as it doesn’t stretch all the way across the width of the device and opts for a tiny right shift key. The small-ish trackpad is also apparently pretty loud when clicked.

The 10.2-inch display has a true 16×9 aspect ratio at 1024×576 (versus most netbooks at 1024×600), so movie lovers might give this little guy a closer look while the rest of us will gather at coffee shops to complain relentlessly about how we have to vertically scroll more often now that we’ve given up those extra few rows of pixels.

Happily, the JoyBook appears to be pretty easy to upgrade/hack, as underside panels give way to the hard drive, an SSD slot, RAM, and even a mini PCI-e slot. Pricing and availability for the US isn’t yet known, but it currently runs for around $550 in Taiwan.

benqjoybookinsides