Mary Lou Jespen, the XO Laptop designer and OLPC’s CTO before leaving to found Pixel Qi, has grand ambitions for her mythical $75 laptop. The company is working on a laptop that will be able to run on for 20 to 40 hours on a single battery charge. Sounds like magic, but they assure us it is just old fashioned science.

The laptop will boast incredible efficiency, thanks to an LCD that can switch to a monochrome view to conserve energy. She offers no concrete details other than that regarding the innovation but we should be on the lookout when they drop sometime during the second half of next year.

ASUS may not be the first bamboo-ensconced laptop in the world, but they are certainly trying to be the best. The laptop will feature a 12-inch screen and will go on sale at Taiwan’s IT Month exhibition this Saturday. They’ll run NT$59,900, or just over $1,800.

The company offers no word as to what configuration that’ll get you though. ASUS says even the base config is fairly capable, however.

A Macforums member bought an "as-is" Macbook Air from Ebay and the unit ended up being an early Air prototype. The computer bears a mark indicating it was built in May 2007, six months before the line was introduced.

There are a few changes from the final design: The microphone positioning is a bit off, the keyboard has no lighting, and it runs an interim build of OS X 10.5. The bottom, as shown in the photo above, is black-colored aluminum. Apple has offered no word as to how the prototype unit escaped their clutches.

HP has finally formally announced the long-rumored multi-touch TouchSmart tx2 convertible tablet. The unit will be the world’s first multi-touch consumer notebook. It boasts a 12.1-inch swivel display which is LED-backlit. The tx2 comes pre-installed with Windows Vista. It also comes with a bezel-mounted fingerprint reader, an integrated webcam with microphone, Bluetooth, WiFi, stereo speakers, a multicard reader and a LightScribe SuperMulti DVD burner. HP has also loaded it with an AMD Turion X2 dual-core processor, MediaSmart 2.0 software, a VGA output, Ethernet, and at least one USB port. According to sources, they should be going on sale at the HP website any day now. The company has issued no word on pricing.

Toshiba has announced it will be shipping their 500GB laptop drive in December, in time for the holiday season. The 500GB drive has a similar feature set to other drives. It’s 9.5mm, features a 2.5-inch 3Gbps SATA interface, 1.4 watt idle power draw and a 5,400rpm spin. It does lack full-disk hardware encryption, however. Toshiba has offered no word on the price.