Lluon Mobbit WiBro MID Gets Inflated Pre-Order Price

We described the Lluon Mobbit MID, back in December, as a bargain: a roughly $400 price-tag for a 4.8-inch touchscreen, 1.3GHz Intel Atom Z520 processor, 1GB of RAM, a choice of 30GB HDD or 16GB SSD and WiFi, Bluetooth and WiBro.  Something seems to have gone wrong in the weeks since then, however; TG Sambo have finally announced pre-order pricing in Korea, and for the basic model (which lacks WiBro) they're now asking 799,000 won ($575).

It gets worse, too.  Only 150 pre-order units are on sale at that price, which means it's entirely probable that TG Sambo will crank up the cost once the Lluon Mobbit reaches general availability.  If you want the WiBro version (which is unlikely unless you're actually in Korea) then it'll cost you KRW 699,000 ($503) but tie you into an 18-month data contract.

Now admittedly you do get a 2-megapixel camera, a DMB-T TV tuner (again, only really useful in Korea), and the US15W chipset which supports hardware video decoding, but the price increase puts it in line with some impressive alternative MID and UMPC models.  It'll be interesting to see whether TG Sambo ever begin selling the Lluon Mobbit outside of Korea; for the price, I can't see the demand being there.

[via UMPC Portal]