14 DAY TRIAL // Netbooks have, since their inception, been selling strongly thanks to their low prices, long battery life and portability, even in spite of the fact that their actual computing, memory and graphical capabilities were much lower than those of other laptops. Still, as time went by and the market gradually got saturated, it was found that only a good enough reason for consumers to upgrade would enable these entry-level PCs to keep growing as a market. Part of this goal has already been accomplished, with the launch of NVIDIA's next-generation ION, and netbooks seem to have already started adopting this part in their quest to score more sales, even in spite of the extra cost associated with it.
Back at CeBIT 2010, the expo that took place in Hanover, Germany, a number of ION-enabled netbooks made an appearance. One of them, the Acer Aspire One 532G, has already been listed as available for pre-order on a French online store. This device seems bent on scoring sales through its price of under 400 Euro and decent specifications. Not minding the addition of a little extra memory and a better ION, the ASUS Eee PC 1201PN has also made an appearance, on the very same website, asking for an extra 100 Euro (has a tag of 499) in exchange for its superior capabilities.
Like Acer's mobile PC, ASUS's computer runs on an Intel Atom central processor, with a clock of 1.66GHZ, and features WiFi and a 6-cell battery. When it comes to everything else, however, this particular unit wins with an uncommon screen size of 12.1 inches, 2GB memory, an HDD with 320GB storage and Gigabit Ethernet. Not only that, but even its ION GPU has 16 processing cores, as opposed to 8.
All this hardware combined allows the netbook to run the full-featured Windows 7 Home Premium, as opposed to Windows 7 Starter that most products of this kind opt for. Consumers willing to pay the extra 100 Euro will be able to enter possession of this laptop starting on May 1.