Jenneth Orantia06 January 2010, 10:20 PM
CES 2010 | Announcements of upgraded netbooks are coming through thick and fast in Vegas; here are the top 10 netbooks that will tickle your fancy this year.
Page 1 - Intro
If you’re hoping that 2010 will be the year that netbooks stop looking like inbred versions of one another, we’ll try and break it to you gently – you may have to wait another year. Intel’s new Pinetrail platform, with the 1.66GHz Intel Atom N450 (Pineview) processor at the helm, doesn’t offer much by way of performance improvements over the N270/N280; instead, the focus has been on boosting battery life and producing a smaller chip to allow for thinner and lighter netbooks.
Still, with battery life on the latest machines averaging well over eight hours, there’s definitely merit in upgrading to one of the newer netbooks, and features like dual drives (on the BenQ JoyBook Lite U103), smooth 1080p HD video playback (on netbooks with the Broadcom Crystal Video Accelerator), WiMAX support (on the MSI Wind U135) and a multi-touch capacitive touchscreen (on the Lenovo IdeaPad S10-3t) demonstrate that the vendors haven’t just been riding the netbook gravy train.
Of the ten netbooks in this article, only the Acer, Samsung, MSI and Gateway have been officially announced for Australia.
1. Toshiba NB305
Toshiba has applied the old ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ adage to its latest netbook, the NB305 – not a bad way to go, considering the NB205 was one of our favourites in 2009. The newer model uses the same stylish hardware design of its predecessor (available in blue, brown and white), but throws in the 1.66GHz Intel Atom N450 processor, a larger 250GB hard drive, and Windows 7 Starter Edition. The new Pineview processor has enabled Toshiba to shave 100g off the NB305’s weight to 1.2kg, and extend run-time with the 6-cell battery from nine hours to a remarkable 11 hours – this works a treat with Toshiba’s Sleep and Charge technology, which lets you use the netbook’s battery to charge gadgets over USB even if it’s hibernating or switched off. The 10.1-inch display still has the same dinky 1024 x 600 resolution, however – we would’ve liked to see a 1366 x 768 option.
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