New NVIDIA Ion netbook is HD capable

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Shane McGlaun24 July 2009, 7:19 PM

I have said it a million times since I first laid my eyes on the NVIDIA Ion platform back in January, where are all the Ion netbooks?


There are a few Ion machines available like the Japanese DosPara machine. Well this week, we get one more Ion-wielding netbook to check out from a company named Point of View. That brand isn’t exactly a household name, but the rig has the right stuff crammed inside and some bright colors on the outside.

The machine is called the Mobii Ion 230 and inside its bright exterior hides an Intel Atom 230 CPU with the Ion platform handling the HD video capabilities. The little machine has a 10.2-inch screen with a 1024 x 600 resolution and LED backlighting. The Ion platform supports 1080p video and offers NVIDIA tech like CUDA and PurevideoHD.



The little rig has an HDMI out as well so you can enjoy that 1080p goodness on your big screen in the living room. Other features include 1GB of RAM and a 160GB HDD. The risk no optical drive considering the rig is a netbook, but it does offer a memory card reader and a standard 6-cell battery. The battery has enough oomph to run the netbook for up to four hours per charge.

The netbook will come in shockingly bright colors including black, red, and lime and should ship within the next few weeks. The big downside is that the standard OS will be Linux, hopefully a Windows option will be available as well. Availability is expected in the next few weeks at about €349 ($AUD606).

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petert (Senior member):

"The little rig has an HDMI out as well so you can enjoy that 1080p goodness on your big screen in the living room. . . The risk no optical drive . . ."

What am I missing here? How do you use the machine as a HD player to a tv if there is no optical driver; more particularly, if there is no BD drive?

24 July 2009, 11:02 PM (8 months ago)report abuse Send to a friend reply

mtarm1 (User):

well petert, you could use an external one or even copy an iso of the dvd/bd.

and it would be heaps better if it had a tv tuner, you could also use this with the hdmi...

24 July 2009, 11:19 PM (8 months ago)report abuse Send to a friend reply

Discosis (User):

Yes, it'll play HD video (if its encoded in the right format presumably), but how will it fare with fullscreen Flash (which isn't currently hardware accelerated)?

Acer's Aspire Revo also has Ion but reviews from the states show massive performance problems when trying to run Hulu @ fullscreen.

If a device is sold on the strength of "playing HD video", but stutters on YouTube, then you've got major problems. This will be exacerbated by things like XBMC which is also not hardware accelerated (though I believe they're working on it).

25 July 2009, 1:25 AM (8 months ago)report abuse Send to a friend reply

unintitled (User):

"The big downside is that the standard OS will be Linux"

Maybe to you, in my opinion that's an upside to it.

25 July 2009, 6:43 PM (7 months ago)report abuse Send to a friend reply

Tin (Senior Forumologist):

And there's a growing number who agree.

I personally don't see why people think they need Windows on a tiny laptop. It's really only useful for stuff where the OS doesn't matter.

28 July 2009, 3:06 PM (7 months ago)report abuse Send to a friend reply

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