The Broadcom Crystal HD card is a nice little mod that you can use on your netbook to enable HD video playback. It’s a mini PCI Express card that decodes HD videos and takes the strain off of your cpu. This enables you to watch smooth full-screen HD video and stream 1080 video without jitters.
Netbooks have really been improving over the last couple of months, with the next generation Ion graphics and new processors. What that really means is that the prices for the old netbooks have come down to well over $300, and with only a small downgrade in performance.
Here are some of the best netbook deals for (way) under $300.
1. 
- Asus Eee PC 1005HA- With a 10.1″ display, Windows 7 starter and a 10 hour battery this netbook has a great battery life and is bargain priced at only $269 at Amazon.
2. 
- HP Mini 210 – 10.1″ display, 1GB of DDR2 RAM, Intel GMA 3150 graphics and Intel Atom 1.66GHz N450 processor for only $259 at Amazon
3. 
– Acer Aspire One 532 - Intel Atom N450 processor, 802.11 b/g/n wifi and Windows 7 for only $279
Laptopmag has one of the first reviews up of the new D260 netbook from Acer. Basically it is cheap, thin, light and gets the job done but also suffers from a low battery life and lackluster performance.
The D260 features the new Intel Atom 1.83GHz N470 processor but is still slower in most tests than netbooks with the older N450 processor. Here are the full specs:
The high points of the D260 are its lightweight and thin design, extra large trackpad and low price ($299).
Some details have surfaced that the new Acer Aspire One D255 will feature the new dual core Atom N550 processor. The chip features 2 1.5GHz cores with 512KB of L2 cache, as well as hyperthreading. The hyperthreading feature will make the processor actually act like 4 cores, and should provide a needed boost to processing speeds.
Joanna Stern at Engadget has run the new AMD powered Acer Aspire One 521 through its paces and it is almost everything we hoped it could be. The 1.7GHz AMD cpu and ATI Radeon HD 4225 gpu combination packs a punch that knocks out any comparable netbooks with Atom processors.
Here are the benchmark results when compared with some other standard netbooks:
A 1481 on 3DMark06 isn’t too shabby, even beating the HP Mini 311 with Nvidia Ion’s score of 1386. When it came to playing videos 720 and 1080 played fine on the netbook, even when output to a 40″ tv through the hdmi out. Flash videos on youtube played flawlessly for the 720 but with the 1080 setting became jittery at times. Joanna also tried out World of Warcraft and managed 28fps.
Basically this netbook isn’t a gaming rig but handily beats everything else in the category, and multitasking and HD videos are no match for this machine. Here are the full specs:
At the moment this new Aspire One is the best 10″ netbook you can get in my opinion, with a great combination of CPU and graphics capabilities. It’s available through Amazon now for only $349.
We have known for awhile that the Asus Eee PC 1215N was coming, and that it would have the new Ion 2 GPU with Optimus switching technology. A new development though is that the 1215N will feature a dual-core 1.8Ghz D525 Atom processor.
Here are the other specs:
Samsung recently announced their new N230 netbook and released some press photos. The new netbook will feature a choice of 2 processors (a 1.66GHz N450 or 1.83GHz N470 Atom) and either a 32Wh or 66Wh battery. The 66Wh battery will be good for almost 14 hours of battery life according to Samsung so I wouldn’t expect much past 11 or 12, but that’s still pretty good.
Asus Eee PC 1005PE 14hr batt $377.89 Asus Eee PC 1005HA $269.99
Asus Eee PC 1005HA blue $339.97
Toshiba Mini 305 blue $339.95 Asus Eee PC 1005PE blue $353.39
HP Mini 210 $304.98
Asus Eee PC 1005PE white $326.87 Asus Eee PC 1005PE 14hr batt $372.12 Asus Eee PC 1001P $289.99
Dell Mini 10 w/ tv tuner $372.78
