New Netbook Reviews

With the new wave of netbooks coming out featuring the new N450 processor comes good news for the “old” netbooks; they’re alot cheaper. And if you look at the N450 processor it has no real advantages over the N270 and N280 except for a little longer battery life.

So if you’re looking for a new netbook and want to save some money here are some great deals:

HP Mini 110: 10.1″ screen, 1.66 GHz Atom N270 processor, Windows XP, 3G mobile broadband, 6 cell battery, 160GB hd, b/g wifi, HP recertified-  $235.00 at ecost

Gateway LT2023u: 10.1″ screen, 1.66 GHz Atom N270 processor, Windows XP, 6 cell battery, 160GB hd, b/g wifi- $270 at Amazon

Lenovo S10-2: 10.1″ screen, 1.66 GHz Atom N270 processor, Windows 7, 3 cell battery, 160GB hd, b/g wifi- $279 at Amazon

Nvidia introduced switchable graphics several years ago, and back then it was called hybrid graphics. The only problem was, noone was switching. Today they unveiled Nvidia Optimus, a switchable graphics technology that automatically switches to either the low-power integrated chip for extended battery life or the discrete Nvidia GPU for HD videos and games.

As we saw with the new M11X from Alienware with switchable graphics the discrete Nvidia GPU can allow for some pretty graphics intensive operations. The only problem with this is that you have to actually  push a button to make the switch. With this new option the graphics chip switches itself automatically based on the graphics load.

Checkout the scores before and after the switch:

The biggest ingredient in this new system is Nvidia’s custom drivers, which can detect whether a given workload can be run efficiently through the integrated chipset or need a boost from the discrete GPU. This transfer occurs instantaneously and the user doesn’t even notice the switch. Here is a video from Engadget playing around with an Asus UL50VF with the new switchable graphics system.

Nvidia said Optimus will be supported in Intel’s Core i3, i5, i7, and Core 2 Duo as well as all Pine Trail netbooks. The first notebooks are due outshortly including Asus UL50VF, N61Jv, N71Jv, N82Jv and U30Jc, and netbooks shortly thereafter.

via nvidia and engadget

The Symbian OS (most common in cellphones) has recently gone open source, and with that comes development for new devices. Accordian to Symbian chief exec Lee Williams, the most likely adaptation of this is to tablets, but netbooks could be supported as well.

The netbook side of this port job will come from the “Wild Ducks” side project, which aims at getting Symbian working with the Atom processor. Here is a video put together by Nokia (they own Symbian) that shows what their vision of the future looks like.

via slashgear

Intel has released an updated graphics driver for Intel GMA950 netbooks (almost all of them). This updated driver gives you two new screen resolution settings (1024×768 or 1152×864) which is important because some programs don’t support displays as low as 1024×600.

This update won’t actually give you any extra pixels on your screen, it just takes away selected ones when rendering, so the effect is funny looking text. This isn’t a setting you will want to use for everyday web browsing or anything, but if you have an application or game that you’ve been wanting to load on your netbook but couldn’t because of the screen resolution, now you can.

Here is the driver download path:   (IntelGMA950_win7_8.15.10.1912)

We’ve made a small update to our sortable netbook database, which has been available since October to help you quickly sort through all of the netbook specs. It now has a “Real time price” column which you can hover over to get real time updates from Amazon including availability, average customer rating, and of course price.

Let me know if you have another netbook you’d like in the database and I’ll add it, but the database now includes 26 of the latest netbooks and most of the new Pine Trail netbooks so it’s pretty up to date.