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We’ve been hearing about EMTEC’s unusual Gdium netbook for months. But it looks like the company is finally getting ready to launch the netbook. Gdium recently launched a “one laptop per hacker” program to help build a developer community. And now Engadget reports that EMTEC will be showing the netbook at CES next week and plans to start selling the Gdium to US customers soon after.

The netbook will have a $400 price tag, and the most unusual storage system of any netbook to date. Instead of offering a hard drive or built in solid state disk, EMTEC has built the Gdium netbook to work with a removable “G-Key,” which is basically an 8GB or 16GB removable USB flash drive that holds the operating system, files, and programs. The idea is that you can grab your G-Key and carry your desktop environment in your pocket. Just plug it into another Gdium to pull up your files, programs, and settings.

This concept seems like a good idea for people who are using desktop computers. I’m not as convinced it makes sense for netbooks. But I get tthe feeling tghat Emtec wants to target educational markets where students might use a number of machines interchangeably rather than being assigned to a single PC.

In addition to the unusual storage system, the Emtec Gdium shuns the usual Intel Atom or VIA C7 CPU you’ll find in most netbooks. Instead it uses a 900MHz 64-bit Loongson processor.

You can read more about the Emtec Gdium in the Liliputing Product Database.