We've been keeping an eye on Aldebaran's NAO robot since before it even took its first steps, and it now looks like the little guy is finally set to try to make it on its own in the wild world of the commerical market. That word comes courtesy of an exhaustive white paper posted by Aldebaran on the arXiv website, which also includes the helpful little detail that the bot will cost interested laboratories about €10,000 (or roughly $15,600). Unfortunately, there's no indication as to exactly when the bot will be available, but those in the market for one can at least tide themselves a bit over by pouring over the details available in the PDF at the link below.

[Via Slashdot]

Atom-based desktops still aren't nearly as plentiful as Atom-based netbooks, but that equation looks to be slowly changing, with Korea's Ripple only the latest to join the fray with its new "Mini Chocolate" desktop. This one packs the usual 1.6GHz Atom processor into its Mini-ITX form factor, along with support for up to 2GB of RAM, four USB ports, two SATA sockets, and a single IDE socket, plus room for a slot-loading optical drive, which you'll have to supply yourself (along with most of the other components). As you can see above, you can also get it in your choice of three colors, with each setting you back 209,000 Korean won, or just about $200.

Aigo hasn't been keeping many secrets about its Atom-based MID, but it has been slightly less than forthcoming with any official word of a price or release date. The company now looks to have finally gotten its act together, however, with it announcing that the handheld, now officially dubbed the MID P8860, will be going on sale in Hong Kong on August 8th for $5,228 HKD (or about $670 -- a full $100 less than the last price we heard). That'll get you an 800MHz Atom Z500 processor, along with 512MB of RAM, a 4GB SSD, built-in WiFi, Bluetooth and, perhaps most notably, GPS. We even hear you can run XP on it.

[Thanks, Joe]