Articles

Articles

Samsung NC20 – More Information (HD Video, Graphics, CPU)

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Samsung NC20 A few days ago, gagadget, a (correction) Ukrainian gadget site for Russian-speaking readers, got their hands on a lot of information about 12.1″ Samsung NC20 and posted quite a few images, including screenshots of the hardware drivers and configuration as well as the keyboard layout. There is video and photos included showing off the built-in 1.3MP webcam. There is also quite a bit of information about HD video playback on the NC20.

The NC20 is based on the VIA Nano U2250 CPU (1.3GHz, 1MB L2 cache), and remember, the NVIDIA CEO had good things to say about the VIA Nano in comparison to the Intel Atom, although it is using a slightly older chipset.

From the software/driver downloads from Samsung UK and from the screenshots, more details about the hardware have emerged:
– VIA VX800 Chipset
– VIA Chrome9 HC3 Integrated
– Atheros Wireless
– Synaptics Touchpad
– 1.3MP Namuga Webcam
– Broadcom Bluetooth
– 160GB Samsung HM160HI Spinpoint M5 HDD (8MB Cache, 1.5Gbps)
– Already a BIOS firmware package – 04MQ

The VX800 chipset supports up 4GB of RAM, unlike the 2GB of Intel’s 945 chipset. It will be interesting to see if that translates to the NC20 – there are 4GB DDR2 SODIMMs out there – Crucial and some of the other memory makers produce them. They are very expensive (relative to the cost of netbooks).

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Netbooks (Dell Inspiron Mini 9) and Photography

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How does a netbook hold up when when compared to more conventional laptops used by professional photographers? Pretty well actually. Rob Galbraith wrote an article comparing three conventional laptops along with a netbook (Dell Inspiron Mini 9), looking at color accuracy, how useful are they … Read more

NVIDIA CEO Interview – Ion, Netbooks, etc. (LAPTOP Mag)

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NVIDIA Yesterday we mentioned that NVIDIA is telling people to speak up if they want to see companies selling products with NVIDIA’s new Ion platform. LAPTOP Magazine has conducted an extensive review with Jen-Hsun Huang, the co-founder, president, and CEO of NVIDIA, and he talked about the ION platform as well as netbooks and the impact on various industries (including the software industry).

No word on when Ion will hit the market, but a very nice bit of information to come out of this is that he believes the target price for an Ion-based device is $399. Good news for those of us interested in the Ion platform – this could very well be the biggest thing since the Intel Atom came out, since it’s adding a GeForce 9400M to the mix. The 9400M would be a huge increase in the graphics power of netbooks and would open up a lot of applications.

I believe the most interesting things that Huang discussed were not about NVIDIA’s plans, but about the competition, VIA, and netbooks in general.

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2009 – The Year of the Netbook (Not the Year of the Smartphone or MIDs)

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Netbooks A new report by ABI Research claims that 2009 should be the break-out year for ultraportable netbooks. They believe that up to 35 million of the devices will sell this year, with those numbers climbing to over 135 million by 2013.

ABI believes that a large part of the reason for the projected growth is because netbooks are filling an important demand that Mobile Internet Devices (MIDs) and smartphones are not able to fill, as far as having a clear usage model:

“In recent years, the industry still expected the smartphones to be more than they turned out to be, and most recently, MIDs were thought to be the next big mobile devices segment, but an unclear usage model continues to confuse the market,” ABI analyst Kevin Burden said in a statement. “So today, netbooks’ time has come, and ABI Research expects them to enjoy very strong market growth.”

According to InformationWeek, the report does give credit to smartphones, saying they paved the way for netbooks, because they were able to introduce people to what was possible with mobile devices and web/internet access.

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Netbooks and Screen Resolutions

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Doug over at CrunchGear has written a commentary about the state of netbooks and display resolutions. It’s more of a plea to netbook makers, and I agree completely. We’ve reached a point where outside of a new platform (NVIDIA Ion) or new CPUs (dual-cores), there’s … Read more