Hasta La Gadget!

Well, well, here’s something to spice up that upcoming post-CES malaise. The second Monday of the first January of the 2010th year of the Gregorian calendar seems set to be the day Atom-powered netbook lovers have been waiting for. DigiTimes today reports that the long (much too long) awaited move to the Pine Trail platform is set to go off with a pretty major bang of vendor support come next month. Acer, ASUS, Lenovo, and MSI are all said to have lined up their N450 wares — we know that for a fact with Lenovo — and are now awaiting Lord Intel’s predetermined date to start shipping. We’re also hearing the even faster N470 chip will start making the rounds in March 2010, meaning that the first quarter of next year will see more netbook innovation than the last year and a half combined.

Atom N450 netbook torrent undammed on January 11 next year? originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 04 Dec 2009 04:12:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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A little later than mid-November, sure, but ASUS has finally unleashed to the US masses its 12.1-inch Eee PC 1201HA. Available at Best Buy for a penny under $330, it’s got all the standard affairs: 1.33GHz Intel Atom Z520, 1GB RAM upgradeable to 2GB, 160GB HDD, WiFi, and a touted 6 hour, 38 minute battery life. The catch here is Windows XP — sorry 7 lovers, but if you’re feeling particularly adventurous, there’s always Chrome OS.

ASUS Eee PC 1201HA now on sale in the US originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 30 Nov 2009 00:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It was late-August when we first got word of a new addition to the Eee PC lineup, the 12-inch, Ion-smuggling Eee PC 1201N. ASUS has just now confirmed the thing and a few sites have rather coincidentally posted hands-on impressions of it — but let’s go over those specs one more time before we dive into that, shall we? It has a 12.1-inch, 1366 x 768 LED-backlit display (that’s sadly glossy), a dual-core Atom 330 processor at 1.6GHz, 2 or 3GB of DDR2 memory, either a 250 or 320GB HDD, a six-cell battery, and Windows 7 Premium. All that for just $499 which, to us, sounds like a stupendously good deal. So, those impressions? They seem intentionally brief, as if nobody’s quite allowed to give real opinions, but a short video below from Laptop shows off the sleek, Seashell-style design from all angles. Surely more thorough coverage will be online before the latest netbook hits retail sometime in mid-December.

[Thanks, John B]

Continue reading ASUS’ Ion-packing Eee PC 1201N gets official, gets handled (video)

ASUS’ Ion-packing Eee PC 1201N gets official, gets handled (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 19 Nov 2009 06:51:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Nobody said running a netbook hackintosh would be easy — but nobody said they’d make it this hard. Apple is currently engaged in a war of compatibility with Palm and, if the developer build of Snow Leopard version 10.6.2 is any indication, the Atom processor is next on the smack down list. Word on coder street is that the upcoming revision of OS X will kill support for Intel’s little powerhouse. That could certainly change before it hits the world at large, but we wouldn’t bet on it. So, if you’re viewing this on an netbook install of your own devising, you may be stuck at version 10.6.1 (or earlier) for awhile — or you may need to do a little custom kernel building. Either way, we’re thinking that if Apple ever gets around to making a netbook it probably won’t be an Atom-powered one.

[Via OS X Daily]

Filed under: Laptops, Software

Apple killing Atom support, dreams of netbook hackintoshers in next Snow Leopard release? originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 02 Nov 2009 06:59:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Remember that lone Pine Trail nettop that was spotted yesterday morning? That wasn’t the only next-gen Atom product that KND had up its sleeve — not by a long shot. The company has an array of netbooks, nettops, and one hybrid combination of the two displayed on its website, all captured in tiny little pictures like the one you see to the right. On the low end there’s the K116, an 11.6-inch netbook with an N450 processor, 1GB of RAM, and a 250GB hard disk. Two nettops are planned, including the K185 we saw yesterday as well as the K19W with its 19-inch, 1440 x 900 screen, dual-core Atom D510 processor, 2GB of RAM, and again a 250GB hard disk. Finally there’s the middle-man, the K133 netbook that shares its specs with the K19W, but is included in a 13.3-inch laptop form. All are spec’d out at the read link below, but none with prices or ship dates. The latest word on the Pine Trail platform release is that the N450 chips will be let loose on January 3, and that several devices will be shipping on that very same day. You can probably connect the dots as well as we can.

[Via netbooknews.de]

Read – KND Pine Trail lineup
Read – Atom N450 release date rumors

Filed under: Desktops, Laptops

Slew of Pine Trail packing portables announced, processor release slated for early Jan? originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 16 Oct 2009 07:06:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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