UK Netbook Review

Good news everyone! Pixel Qi‘s 10.1 inch, outdoor readable display is finally shipping! [UPDATE: Already sold out!] You can now the DIYnetbook screen kit which will replace your current netbook screen and swap it with one from Pixel Qi display. Supposedly, the whole process takes just 5 to 10 minutes. The kits cost a whopping $275 (only available in the US for now), but to be fair, the kits are aimed at early adopters and enthusiasts at this point and the price should come down as more quantities are produced.

Netbooked reports that the latest version of Flash 10.1 RC4 allows the Intel GMA 4500MHD graphics chipset to playback 1080p HD Flash video smoothly! If this has you scratching your head, you may have missed that these latest (pre-beta) versions of Flash allow for video hardware acceleration (rather than just relying on the Atom processor). One of the previous releases (RC2 or RC3), provided fullscreen 1080p Flash on Nvidia ION devices, but this appears to be the first one to support the built-in Intel Graphics.

Netbooked speculates that two large players in the netbook space, Samsung and Lenovo, maybe be launching new netbooks based on VIA’s VX900 processor.  They point out that both manufacturers have used VIA processors before – the Samsung with the Samsung NC20 and Lenovo i the IdeaPad S12.   Supposedly the new VIA VX900processor will be [...]

The new USB 3.0 standard offers data transfer speeds up to 10 times faster than the 480Mb/s that is possible from the current USB 2.0. Normally, new tech like this is reserved for the high end machines, costing thousands of dollars before it trickles down, but DigiTimes reports that Asus will be adding USB 3.0 support to the Eee PC netbook and Eee Box nettop lines soon.

NVIDIA is introducing a new technology that allow laptops and netbooks to switch between integrated and dedicated graphics chips. For example, if you’re on Facebook, writing email, or just doing light surfing, you could switch to your chipset’s integrated graphics chip to save power. Then, when you’re watching an HD movie, or playing a graphics intensive game, NVIDIA’s new technology will automatically switch to the higher performance, dedicated, graphics card. The technology, which Nvidia showed off today, is called Optimus, and it’s designed to work with GeForce 200M, 300M, and GeForce M GPUs as well as the soon to be released NVIDIA ION 2 graphics processor. It supports Intel’s Core 2 Duo, Core i3, i5, and i7 processors and Intel Atom N450 CPUs.