Raon Digital Everun Note gets SSD storage, cheaper version

Raon Digital's Everun Note has generally done a great job impressing reviewers with its balance of portability and power; the only two areas of real contention have been the speed of the hard-drive and the device's price.  Raon Digital ship the Everun Note with a standard 60GB hard-drive that dragged down the benchmarks, and the sticker price of $879 is high compared to other ultraportable devices.  Now the company has announced two new versions, both with SSD storage, to slot either side of the existing HDD model, and in the process offer a cheaper path to ownership.

The D24S is the new premium model, with 24GB of split-capacity SSD.  That's made up of 8GB of fast SLC and 16GB of standard MLC flash memory, presumably arranged so that the OS and program files are on the faster storage to reduce start-up speeds.  As for the S16S, the new entry-level Everun Note, it swaps Windows XP for Ubuntu Mobile and gets a 12GB MLC SSD.

The downside is that, with the cheaper S16S, you miss out on the storming dual-core AMD Turion processor that makes the Everun Note so speedy, and instead get a Sempron CPU running at 1.2GHz.  It's reflected in the price, though; Raon Digital are aiming for $659 pre-tax retail for the S16S and $950 pre-tax for the D24S.