UK Netbook Review

This “Dragonfly QT Pro” features a familiar aluminum alloy shell of Apple Macbook Pro. The 14-inch, 1366 x 768 netbook’s also got brand spanking new Ion 2 switchable graphics a 1.66GHz Atom D410 and 1GB of memory help pump out 1080p video while keeping case temperatures at a lap-happy 36 degrees Celsius. There’s also a more mundane 160GB hard drive, 802.11 b/g/n WiFi and HDMI to round out it’s 4.2 pound weight. Rumour is it will cost roughly $3000 RMB (about 300 pounds. Sound good? Well, there’s one drawback, only 2 hours of battery life.

From Digitimes we learn today that NVidia has received orders for ION 2 based chips from Acer designed to support Pine Trail processors. If the rumour holds true (and you never quite know for sure with Digitimes, it means we’ll see a Pine Trail processor’ed netbook with Nvidia’s Ion 2 graphics chip from Acer in 2010. The ION 2 graphics platform is said to offer more than 2x the power of the current ION platform and will include support for switchable graphics and the VIA processors. We’ll probably see more about Nvidia’s ION 2 at CES 2010.

We’ve had confirmation that the Nvidia Ion chipset alone costs between $30-35 US dollars here at $30 – $35.  We also know that Intel was charges more to manufacturers who don’t buy Intel’s own Atom processor + chipset bundle.  It’s $25 for the bundle, or $45 for the Atom processor alone. So adding together $45 [...]

NVIDIA hasn’t announced anything themselves at this point, but Fudzilla has the inside track on good authority that the company is hard at work on a successor to the already powerful Ion platform with significant improvements. Improvements are set to come in the form of decreased die size and much faster graphics coming with more [...]

Not quite the usual “netbook” by any means – and I say that because finally someone has brought out a device utilizing Intel’s dual core netbook processor – the Atom 330. Better yet, they’ve paired it with Nvidia’s Ion graphics chipset. Straying from convention doesn’t stop there, however, as Japan’s DosPara has now gone out and broken a few more rules with its new Prime Note Cresion NA model, which packs a larger than usual 12-inch displa and weights in at a hefty (for netbooks) 1.92kg.