14 DAY TRIAL // No doubt, netbook fans and those especially loyal to Acer will be distraught after finding out that the Aspire one 532G will never see the light of day. Said device was once touted as the first ION 2 netbook to ever be officially unveiled, but driver problems related to the NVIDIA Optimus technology appear to have facilitated the product's untimely death. This does not mean the end of all ION 2 as we know it, however, there appears to be at least one other PC maker that has succeeded where Acer appears to have failed.
ASUS has started shipping the Eee PC 1201PN, a mobile PC quite unusual among its peers. Mostly, this machine stands out because it does not adhere to the rule that all netbooks should stay at 10.1 inches in size or lower. To be more specific, the netbook boasts an LED-backlit LCD display with a diagonal of 12.1 inches and a native resolution of 1366 x 768 pixels.
The large display is not all that the 1201PN has special. In fact, the 1.66GHz Atom CPU is backed up by 2GB of RAM, not just the 1GB that such electronics tend to limit themselves to. The graphics solution, of course, is the NVIDIA GT218 ION 2, based on the 40nm manufacturing process.
Other specifications include a 250GB hard disk drive, 500GB of ASUS web storage and all the predictable I/O and connectivity capabilities, namely 10/100 LAN, a 0.3-megapixel webcam, 802.11 b/g/n WiFi, Bluetooth 2.1 and a six-cell battery, among other things.
The ASUS Eee PC 1201PN, pre-loaded with Windows 7 Home Premium, is now shipping to US customers and will be able to last, on a single battery charge, for up to six hours. The price is set at $484 and all details regarding delivery and additional fees may be found on the official retail page on Amazon.