The Business Centre

A couple of weeks after images of the Amilo Mini netbook first appeared on YouTube, Fujitsu Siemens officially launched the device at the IFA electronics show in Berlin on Wednesday.

Like other netbooks, the Amilo Mini is small and light. It has a 9-inch screen, runs the 1.6GHz version of Intel's Atom processor and will be available in several configurations with hard-disk drive storage space from 30G bytes to 80G bytes, said Bjorn Fehrm, a Fujitsu Siemens representative who was demonstrating the machine at IFA.

The model on show at IFA had 1G byte of memory and was running Windows XP Home.

The company plans to launch it in Europe in October this year. It will cost €399 (US$584). A similar computer will be launched by Fujitsu in the Americas and Asia.

The netbook segment of the laptop market -- sometimes called low-cost laptop, mini-laptop or ultramobile PC -- has come alive in the past few months after PC makers scrambled to emulate the success of Taiwan's Asustek Computer and its Eee PC.

At least one other major laptop vendor, South Korea's LG Electronics, is launching a netbook at the event; others, previously announced at June's Computex expo in Taiwan, are due on the market in the next few months.