Verizon confirmed that they will be offering a deal on a 3G HP netbook for $99, with a two year plan. Not a bad deal, but I haven't been impressed by HP's speed so far. Probably due to their hard drives.
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I just found another review of an nVidia ION test box, this time from Notebookcheck. This isn't exactly "news" since it's from February, but I just turned it up in Google, so I figured in case someone else missed it somehow, I'd share: Wired posted this article on netbooks a few days ago (ok, so all of my news isn't exactly fresh off the digital press, so sue me), which takes a look at the genesis of netbooks. I'm not sure if I agree with all of the author's assertions, but this is an interesting read nonetheless. More news about the Psion lawsuit and Intel's counter suit today. The last I heard, Intel was claiming that Psion had not used the Netbook trademark since 2003, when it gave up on its own device with an oh-so-similar form factor and niche. In the filing, Psion lists retail sales (in dollars) of laptop computers "under Psion's NETBOOK mark" in the U.S. from 1999 to the present. For example, in 2005 Psion cites sales of netbooks at $1,709,433, in 2006 sales were $2,073,207, and in 2007, Psion says retail sales were $586,680. I'm thinking that Intel and Psion are going to end up settling on this one. I don't think that Psion has an especially strong case, and the whole thing smells to me like an attempt to cash in on a trend the company failed to get off the ground itself. However, Intel's claim that the Netbook trademark was abandoned may be weakened if the court finds in favor of Psion on this point. Here's a really cool touch screen netbook I found on the Crave blog on cnet. Talk about a company living up to its name! Always Innovating demonstrated this new touch screen at Demo 09. According to Gartner, PC sales are on the decline, and netbook sales on the rise: Gartner pins a significant part of the shift to netbooks; although they won't prevent an overall PC industy decline, they should account for about 8 percent of shipments during the year and are likely to become more affordable in the year as well. A typical model of one of the mini notebooks with a 8.9-inch display, a 160GB hard drive and Windows XP Home that sells for $450 today should cost about $400 by year's end. Many of these systems continue to sell to users in established areas that are buying a second or third PC, but Gartner also sees price drops contributing to more people in developing-world areas buying netbooks. According to this article at GottaBeMobile, Asus is phasing out the 8.9" screens on their netbooks. Windows 7 is said to be a great OS, even better in Beta than any prior version of Windows was at release. It's supposedly not as huge of a resource hog, and the prospect of being able to pick up a Windows 7/ION platform netbook late this year or sometime early next year had me salivating in anticipation. It looks like at least Asus is open to using Google's free operating platform, Android to run on netbooks, according to this Bloomberg article. ION is nVidia's new hardware platform for netbooks, consisting of an Intel Atom processor and an integrated geForce 9400 GPU. The platform will release later in 2009, and add only about $50 to the average cost of a netbook according to nVidia. More than a fair price for what promises to be a great boost for netbook performance. |