ASUS's new non-Eee netbook, the N10, has some oomph
Netbooks were originally promised as $200 light web browsing and email laptops, and as the prices have quickly been driven up to $500 or more, there's been an understandable amount of grousing about the market's failure to stay in the price range it originally identified for itself. But for those of us who had lusted in the past over subnotebooks like Sony's more diminuitive VAIOs, which could cost as much as $2000-$3000, there's some wiggle room: some of us wouldn't be adverse to paying closer to a grand for a truly capable netbook.
ASUS, who hacked out the netbook space with their line of Eee netbooks, now seems to be creeping for the luxury consumer. Their new netbook, the N10 series, eliminates the Eee branding entirely and instead tries to deliver a more capable mini-note to customers not afraid to spend a couple bills more.
The 10.2-inch, LED-backlit N10s will ship with either Vista Home Premium (don't get this), Vista Business (don't get this either) or XP Pro and feature a 1.6GHz Atom processor, between 160GB-250GB of HDD, 2GB of RAM and hybrid graphics, switching between an NVIDIA GeForce Go 9300M GS 256MB or Intel GMA950 onboard. There's a built-in Express Card slot, a 1.3MP webcam, fingerprint reader, three USB ports and a host of other connections. Better: it ships with a 6-cell battery, quoting 6.5 hours of usage.
That's a capable little machine for $749 ($849 on the outside). It should be available later this year. If nothing else, it's nice to see a machine actually distinguish itself substantially in the netbook space.
ASUS N10 Launches [Slashgear]
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Vista runs surprisingly well on these kinds of machines as long as there is at least 2 GB of RAM. I have a Wind with 2 GB of RAM and Vista Ultimate runs at least as well as XP (I haven't benchmarked it but I've seen benchmarks of Vista performing better) and the 3-cell battery lasts for a bit longer than XP, I've read that it's due to Vista's improved power management over XP. Much to my surprise, Media Center plays HDTV without issue, though SDTV is actually very choppy and basically unwatchable. It may be the tuner or the driver or the fact that I installed the TV Pack, but it's my only USB tuner so I can't try something else instead. Throw in the NVIDIA card they're putting in this thing and it will have no problems running Vista.
Seriously, only 600 pixels tall? I'm sorry I sound like a broken record, but it continues to astonish me that people don't care about actually having enough resolution to be comfortable browsing the web for more than a few minutes.
I understand a market for a $750 netbook — but I don't understand why all the models they're putting into this category have the same crappy less-than-XGA screen.
But it is nice that one can choose between Nvidia graphics and Intel GMA, the latter of which is plenty of power for what I'd need and which has excellent works-out-of-the-box open source drivers. (Thanks, Asus, and thanks, Intel!)