Hoping to fill a gap in the market between netbooks and traditionally expensive ultra portable laptops, AMD unveiled its Yukon mobile platform back in January. Indeed it seemed like a nice compromise between price, size and performance. Problem is, the platform has thus far been available only as part of HP's Pavilion dv2 notebook, whereas Intel has been winning customers and making some noise with its competing CULV offering.


Looking to even things out a bit, BenQ is now joining the scene by announcing its Yukon-based Joybook Lite T131. Weighing in at just under 4 pounds, this 13.3-inch laptop packs a 1.5GHz AMD Sempron 200U processor along with 1GB of DDR2 memory and ATI Mobility Radeon X1270 graphics. There's a built-in 1.3 megapixel webcam, a 2-in-1 card reader, Wireless N connectivity, Ethernet, two USB ports, VGA out and its standard 250GB hard drive (upgradable to 320GB) comes preloaded with Windows Vista Home Basic.

Unfortunately, it seems Yukon isn't as power efficient as we'd hoped, with the six-cell battery reportedly good for a mere 3 hours of use. The Joybook Lite T131 will launch in China later this month, though pricing and release dates in other markets have not been released.