Hong Kong-based Jointech is offering the cheapest netbook on the market, the JL7100. Priced at a miserable $99, this ARM 9-based toy ships with Windows CE 5, so you shouldn't have much trouble getting to grips with it.

The skid row netbook looks pretty nice too, it has a 7-inch 800x480 screen, but it can only display 64k colors. It measures 225 x 165 x 36mm, weighs a mere 680g and you'll get a nice software bundle with it. Design-wise it's an Eee knockoff, as you can see for yourself.



So where's the catch? Well, for one it has just 64MB of RAM, something you might expect on a Pentium MMX machine. It also has 64MB of storage, something we didn't see since the late eighties. However, it has 3 USB ports, so you should have no trouble getting some extra storage, but having a USB drive sticking out of your ultra-portable netbook is never a good thing. Unfortunately, it has no SD slot, so you're stuck with a dongly USB flash drives.

To be honest, considering the price, these drawbacks can easily be ignored. The JL7100 should be available in black, pink, white and sky blue, and Jointech promises up to 4 hours of battery life, which sounds realistic if you take into account the hardware inside. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem it's available just yet, so take the $99 price tag with a grain of salt.

In case you know where we can get some, please contact us. We need a dozen for our interns.

You can find out more on the product page, here.