Here comes some good news for those of us who thought that our budgets would prevent us from participating in the SSD laptop revolution: Asus has announced that it will sell five budget, flash-based laptops, ranging in price from $199 to $549. The machines will sport a 7-inch display, a flash drive ranging in size from 1GB to 40GB and will drop later this year. Such machines could be perfect for the IT organization on a budget, or for the mobile sales team that never fails to lose or break a lappie. At that price, you could even afford to buy a dozen so that you might finally live out your fantasy of having a dozen monkeys working in tandem on the greatest novel ever written. Or something. The laptops will allegedly use Intel SSDs, though there’s no word yet on any of the other components.

For more on the budget portables:
– see this Taipei Times article