Shane McGlaun16 June 2009, 2:10 PM
First netbook with NVIDIA Ion and Intel Atom 330 CPU hits Japan with massive price tag -- Japanese wallets groan.
One of the things I had hoped to see at CES 2009 in Las Vegas this year were
NVIDIA Ion powered netbooks with the 9400M graphics engine. Unfortunately, there were none at the show and some of the vendors I talked to went so far as to tell me Ion would make netbooks too expensive.
It's been months now since CES and finally an Ion netbook has shown up -- in Japan anyway. Japan is the first country to get an Ion netbook running the Atom 330 CPU. The rig comes from DosPara and is called the
Prime Note Cresion NA. So far Ion has shown up only in nettops like the
Acer Aspire Revo.
The CPU is teamed with the NVIDIA Ion platform adding a 9400M GPU to the mix for HD video playback. The rig is right on the verge of notebook territory with a 12.1-inch screen sporting a resolution of 1366 x 768. Honestly, Ion makes no sense to me if the screen can't support HD resolutions so the 12.1-inch size is understandable -- though with Windows 7 coming, with its GPU-accelerated GUI, GPUs might become more important in netbooks. (Of course, Vista had the GPU-accelerated GUI too, but nobody in their right mind would run Vista on a netbook.)
Other features include 2GB of RAM, 320GB HDD, integrated optical drive, a memory card reader, HDMI out, Bluetooth 2.1, Wi-Fi, Gigabit Ethernet, and a 56k modem. The rig isn’t cheap at about $AU771 in Japan without an operating system.