Intel’s new Pine Trail processors have finally launched, and it’s about flippin’ time. A chunk of all netbooks released in the past year or so have run on Intel’s 1.6 GHz Diamondville Atom N270 or N280 processors, which is a nice configuration for a portable mini-computer. Battery life is decent, performance is OK, though it’s no jaw-dropper. It’s aging fast, especially in light of competition from graphically superior NVIDIA Ion chips, so Intel hit us with an upgrade–sort of.
The new 1.66 GHz processors integrate the memory controller and GMA 3150 graphics, which reduces the size and improves efficiency. Early reviews of new Pine Trail computers like the ASUS Eee PC 1005PE indicate that the battery life is notably longer (20 percent), but the performance is largely the same. It “felt slightly snappier than netbooks with Atom N270 or N280 chips, but not by much,” Joanna Stern of Engadget said. It’s capable of comfortably running several small-footprint programs at once (a browser, messaging clients, music libraries, for example), but any kind of heavy media editing is best left to a more powerful machine.
Long story short: Pine Trail netbooks are slightly improved versions of older Atom-based netbooks. This falls short of the true overhaul that enthusiasts had hoped for, so we’ll all have to keep our fingers crossed for something better to roll along, but still a decent option as long as the price is right.
The mythical Crunchpad has actually (almost) arrived–only now, it’s the JooJoo Pad. It’s been a dramatic saga so far. Long story short, TechCrunch.com’s Michael Arrington decided in July 2008 that the world needs a web-ready media tablet computer for $200. Singapore-based developer Fusion Garage agreed to design such a device. Things were going swimmingly until summer 2009, when some delays popped up. A $200 tablet suddenly became a $300-$400 tablet, and the street date became a vague “by the end of 2009.” On November 30th, Arrington declared the CrunchPad project dead. On December 7, Fusion Garage CEO Chandra Rathakrishnan announced that, no, it’s actually still alive and Fusion Garage will release it independently as the JooJoo Pad–for a whopping $500. In a move that surprised nobody, Arrington filed a big ‘ol lawsuit against Fusion Garage on December 10.
All the in-fighting aside, the JooJoo Pad should finally ship to pre-ordering customers in 8-10 weeks according to Fusion Garage. $500 is a lot to ask for a keyboard-less device with the guts of a standard $350 netbook, but it sure is slick. It resembles a gigantic, 12-inch iPhone, but with several ports and inputs for future expansions (currently it only supports WiFi, so I’ll take a not-so-wild guess and say that 3G support would be part of any expansion). Rathakrishnan is mum on the exact processor inside this machine (though he’ll have to blurt it out eventually) but for something rumored to be running on the Atom processor, it plays 1080p video very, very well. Check out a JooJoo Pad demo and a chat with Rathakrishnan with Engadget below.
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Dell announced their new ultra-thin and light Vostro V13 13.3-inch notebook yesterday. It’s just 0.65 inches thick, weighs in at a miniscule 3.5 pounds, and costs as little as $450. Now that’s a good deal on an ultraportable.
That base model gets you a Celeron processor and Ubuntu operating system, while the top-notch, $650 model comes with Windows 7 and a ULV Core 2 Duo processor. Other specs include 2GB RAM, VGA input, 2 USB ports, LED-backlit and anti-glare screen at 1366×768 resolution, and a 6-cell battery rated for 4.75 hours (probably around 3 hours in real life).
Yeah, it’s a bit light on specs, but the Vostro V13 is a great option if you want the portability of a netbook with the comfort of a notebook-sized screen and the solid metallic construction of a much more expensive computer. As a writer, this looks like an attractive setup to me.