The E-Book, E-Buku, mNetbook, Mbook, or just Schoolbook — as a special Malaysian edition of the Psion netBook handheld computer has been variously called — is causing a bit of a stir over the Internet in the past few months.

It all started late last year when a couple of these netBooks — claimed to be new and full-featured — were put up for auction on eBay at a fraction of what the manufacturer charges for them.

Interest was instant and bids were heated, which is a measure of the strong following that the product commands. This was curious not least because Psion PLC has got out of the consumer handheld computer market.

Very quickly, however, it turned out that the units — definitely more than a couple — were sourced from Malaysia and do not come with the usual warranty or technical support from the British manufacturer.

Psion had, in 2001, said it was switching its focus to the industrial and enterprise markets. Through joint venture Symbian, it would develop and market its platform technology as the industry standard for the next generation of smartphones and communicators.

Anyway, there is one significant difference between the Mbook and the standard netBook — the operating system (OS), or the software that powers the computer. The Mbook’s installed Epoc release 5, which is the equivalent of the Windows on PCs or the Mac OS on Apples, can pretty much do everything that the netBook’s can, except that it cannot be upgraded short of changing what is called a “personality module” on the motherboard.

The Mbook’s ROM chip was customised specifically for the Malaysian client under a deal referred to by Psion as an “enterprise order”.

In itself, replacing the module is apparently a cinch. A user with some basic knowledge of the insides of a PC should be able to manage that.

But then these chips seem to be very hard to come by, for one reason or another...

As such, early buyers — the successful eBay bidders — cried foul, claiming that they were misled into believing they were bidding for the standard netBook.

About this time, a Malaysian company operating from Sri Hartamas in Kuala Lumpur started advertising the Mbook on its website — at RM990 each (or about US$260 compared to the list price of US$1,300 for the netBook), plus a 56k PC card modem thrown in too.

Information also filtered through that the company, Sita Multimedia Sdn Bhd, had a stock of several thousand Mbooks which it was unloading on the market via the Internet.

Now things get even more curious. Judging from the posts in the Internet forums, orders streamed in from Britain and the US, among other places.

This was before it was determined, with confirmation from Psion subsequently, that the Mbooks were not illegal or grey goods as some people had suggested.

The British company’s stand was simply that it had supplied the units to its Malaysian client under a special order, and what happens to them after delivery is not its business.

A company official, responding to Internet forum posts, stressed that Psion would not offer support for the Mbook in any form, which means people buy it at their own risk.

But where did the Mbooks come from? According to one account, they had been lying in some warehouse for up to two years, remnants from the collapse of a component of the Smart School project.

Nuance went and bought a unit of the Mbook from Sita Multimedia a few weeks ago. The sales person was evasive when asked how the company came into the cache.

“We are just selling them for somebody,” was all he would say.

How many units are available and are they selling well?

“We have sold a few hundred and there are a few hundred more. We are not selling all we have... keeping some for the parts. We can make more money from them than from selling the units.”

The Mbooks were produced for use by teachers and students in an experimental programme under a joint venture called One Ed Dot Com. They were intended to replace textbooks and also to offer Internet access.

The partners were Ericsson — in a technology pact with Psion — and several public and private entities.

One Ed Dot Com failed and the project was abandoned, with the only sign of the venture’s existence now confined to the logo on the start-up screen of the Mbook after a reset.

The logo plate above the keyboard of Nuance’s unit says “MY School Book” instead of “netBook”; otherwise there is no difference in appearance from the standard one.

And far from dying out, forum postings of late have taken a new twist, with people exploring and exchanging ideas on how the Mbook could be re-installed with the standard netBook OS without having to replace the ROM chip.

If anything, the netBook — standard or otherwise — has never enjoyed greater interest. New personal websites have even been created just to chart experiences with the Mbook and to offer tips ranging from software configuration matters to where to get accessories and useful freeware. One such site is http://hasbrouck.org/netbook

Others go a step further, offering step-by-step tutorials, complete with pictures, on how to take the Mbook/netBook apart.

With a full-price standard netBook, how many people would think of undertaking something like that?

And no one could be happier with the development than a German company which is suddenly doing brisk business supplying netBook memory modules that boost computing performance and storage capacity.

But why the strong overall support still for the netBook, with a technology that has arguably been overtaken by that of the ever tinier and sleeker Palm and PocketPC PDAs?

Maybe it is because the netBook’s colour screen, although no great shakes, is big and clear. And it has a very good built-in near full-sized keyboard; no need for a silly add-on keyboard or the even sillier practice of thumb-typing with some “solutions”.

For all practical purposes, the programs that come standard can also hold their own against anything available on the other two platforms.

And there are more programs, freeware and shareware, downloadable from the Internet than one can possibly use.

Apart from multimedia functions like playing videos and MP3s, the netBook is more of a substitute for the notebook computer than a Palm or PocketPC can ever be, Internet and computer- to-computer connectivity included — wireless or cable. So at one-fifth the normal price, why not.

Ultimately, however, it is perhaps because the Psion handhelds have a reputation for being built tough, practical and reliable. If they were cars, they would be the pick-up trucks to the Palm/PocketPC’s flashy roadsters.