Some time in the last twelve months, netbooks moved from the geek and blogger realm to the mainstream. How do I know? I’ve been tallying up the netbook product launches from Vegas. So far I’ve counted new netbooks from Lenovo, Asus, Acer, Samsung, HP, Toshiba, Frontier, Haleron, and BenQ, and I could very well be missing others. Know what they all have in common? Intel Atom chipsets from the new Pine Trail platform.
Intel sewed up the netbook market early on with its Atom processors, and it appears to be retaining its hold as we move in to 2010. (Though AMD may be moving downstream) Personally, I’ve been waiting for the Pine Trail chipsets in order to plan my own netbook upgrade. The Asus Eee 1000HA is my primary computing machine, and I wouldn’t mind a bit more horsepower. I considered springing early for a new netbook with a NVIDIA ION graphics processor to supplement the old-style Atom CPU. However, I’m glad I waited. Brad Linder’s hands-on experience suggests the NVIDIA ION GPU helps out with video processing, but may not make up for the extra processing power consumed by higher resolution netbook screens hitting the market. The jury’s still out on Pine Trail plus NVIDIA ION, but with all the new netbooks being announced, we should have word soon. In the meantime, I’ll start my own hands-on testing when I hit CES later today.