Seen in the wild as early as last August at Fall IDF, Intel's third-generation Classmate PC will be officially unveiled tomorrow at CES 2009.

The Classmate Tablet, as the name implies, has a touch-senstive screen that automatically orients itself when placed into Tablet mode.

Nice handle, huh? The colour scheme, thankfully, has changed since the first iteration was shown in August. It's now presented in a cool blue-and-white livery.

The 8.9in, 1,024x600 screen is familiar to a bunch of netbooks, and a few now have touch-sensitive screens as standard, albeit not as robust as the Classmate's.

We're glad to see that whilst shipping with Windows XP, Intel has added programs that turn handwriting, via the supplied stylus or by your fingers, into the electronic form.

The netbook-in-disguise Tablet will ship with a 1.6GHz Atom CPU (N270), 60GB Samsung 1.8in hard drive, 1GB RAM, 945G graphics, and swiveling webcam. No word on pricing from production partner CTL. We'll find more out tomorrow, no doubt.

Here it is next to the 'clamshell' Classmate, aka gen. 2.

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