Following the fanfare of the Asus Eee PC’s introduction in the last year, a bunch of other manufacturers have jumped on board the bandwagon in the race to the bottom. We’ve already covered HP’s upcoming effort, but some more to enter the race include:

MSI Wind PC (presumably to match your Nintendo Wii)
Everex Cloudbook
Intel Classmate PC
OLPC XO
VIA Nanobook
E-Lead Noahpad
Fukato’s Datacask

Typically all are touting a small form factor, flash memory, a screen size of anywhere between 7″ and 10″, some sort of Linux OS permutation, and a low, low starting price somewhere between AUD$430 & AUD$750.

While this means you may see more people awkwardly typing on tiny keyboards during the early morning commute, this could potentially throw the operating system game wide open.

Okay, if you’re a full on geek you will know the ins-and-outs of the choices between Microsoft Windows variations, Apple’s OSX, and the many different flavours of Linux. But for your everyday user, these machines will be coming to them ready to go with fully featured application sets running on Linux, something that they’ve never used before but has been designed to be easy. And, in the era of Vista woe after Vista woe, this could just get people thinking…

It also could lead to a vast new marketplace when shopping for your next PC, providing legitimacy for a number of smaller manufacturers via their UMPC.

p.s. Hey, we’d love to give you a better review of the usability via a hands-on review, and we will once a manufacturer comes to the party…c’mon, you know you want to…