“What do you expect from an $80 netbook,” asks our friend Sascha of Netbook News? You may of course answer “Not much” but that would be cynical. After all, a box with a 7-inch screen, three USB ports (suck it, MacBook Air), Ethernet and a card reader is surely $80 worth of electronics already?

The MenQ EasyPC E700 is actually made by Cherry Pal, whose tiny Cherry Pal PC we looked at last year. Back then the machine had cloud-based storage, no screen, a 400 MHz Freescale processor and a huge 256MB RAM crammed into a box which looked like a cheap, telco-provided router. It cost $250.

The new MenQ has even lower specs, but is a third the price and is a standalone machine. The chip a 400MHz ARM processor from Samsung, it has 64MB RAM and runs Windows CE (remember that?) and the screen resolution is 800x480. There’s even Wi-Fi in there.

Amazingly, Sascha says that this thing is fast. It runs a web browser, and if you’re used to using a netbook, that’s pretty much all you need. We’re not sure how it would fare on those awful sites that insist on using Flash, but the spec sheet says that YouTube works just fine, along with Skype. Oh, and the system boots in a second.

Still not impressed? Then consider this: The MenQ, an entire computer, costs the same as a 4GB iPod Shuffle. Do you want one now?

$80 Netbook! What Do You Get? [Netbook News. Thanks, Sascha!]

EasyPC [MenQ]