eviGroup Wallet Android MID Gets New Design, Status Update

eviGroup's Pad UMPC is all well and good, but we'd be lying if we said we weren't more interested in the French company's upcoming Android-based MID, the eviGroup Wallet.  The 5-inch touchscreen device was potentially going to arrive in France this month, but company CEO Nicholas Ruiz has confirmed that the process is turning out to be a little trickier than eviGroup expected.  The good news is that there's a new prototype – shown here on the right – which looks a lot less "iPhone inspired" and gains a front-facing webcam, and Ruiz reckons it's still on track for a January release.

In fact, the Wallet is apparently ready for "initial production" with suppliers for the ARM chipsets arranged and several different color variants sketched out (you can see renders in the gallery below).  As far as we're aware there's no core specification change, so the Wallet still has an 800 x 480 WVGA touchscreen, WiFi b/g, GPS and integrated 3G.

As the ongoing CrunchPad/JooJoo saga has shown, getting a new device off the ground and onto shelves is no easy matter, and we're not really surprised that eviGroup are having a few difficulties.  Still, our fingers remain crossed that this could be the low cost sofa-browser of our dreams.