Month: January 2009

Upgrade Asus S101 SSD Storage (Super Talent)

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If you are looking for a third party Solid State Drive (SSD) to upgrade the storage in your 10.2″ Asus S101, you are in luck. Super Talent Technology has announced three new SSD options for the high-end netbook. The S101 currently comes with three options: … Read more

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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Sony VAIO P Series Shipping in the US

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It looks like Sony has bumped up their shipping time for some US customers for the new 8″ Sony VAIO P, at least unofficially. Originally, the VAIO P series was showing a shipping date of February 3, 2009. Engagdet has an article up showing that … Read more

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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