Netbooks - Now With 1000% More Graphics!

This is a guest post by Daniel Shain of  LaptopLogic.com - a great place to find more information on ultraportable laptops or read up on the latest laptop news.

Ever since the infamous Intel Atom N270 came out and dominated the netbook world, we have known that mini-notebooks could be efficiently used, and even multitasked with, as long as you kept your activities within a narrow spectrum of activities. You could surf the web, you could do word processing and use chat clients, and you could perform light multimedia tasks like watching streaming video.

But what if someone told you that for $50, you could add watching HD movies and even (gasp) playing games such as World of Warcaft to your netbook’s repertoire? Because that’s exactly what nVidia has done with the release of the Ion platform.

The new chipset will still use an Intel Atom processor, but nVidia will replace Intel’s GMA 945 integrated graphics with its own GeForce 9400M. According to nVidia, this new chipset will outperform the old one by as much as ten times (or 1000%). This means that, in addition to giving users the option to output HD video with HDMI and play certain games, new netbooks featuring Ion will be able to run more modern operating systems like Vista or Windows 7 without problems. Currently, it’s hard to find a netbook that runs as well on Vista as it does on XP or Ubuntu Linux. What’s more, nVidia claims the new chips will hardly raise the price of netbooks. They estimate it will only cost about $50 more to buy an Ion netbook over the current platform.

That all sounds like good news… but aren’t we missing something here? If a netbook can play games and handle HD video, is it really still a netbook? And let’s not forget that $50 can represent as much as a 17% increase on a $299 netbook, so it’s not quite as innocent as it seems. The real point to consider here is this: Why do people really want netbooks? Are gamers really going to flock to these new Ion machines? Will movie buffs be rushing to buy an external Blu-ray rig so they can watch on their new netbooks? nVidia claims they are doing this to give the user more options, and as far as we’re concerned more options is always a good thing. However it remains to be seen if users really want their netbooks to be more than low cost, lightweight, surfing and chatting machines.

nVidia is expecting the first Ion netbooks to hit the market in mid 2009. Keep on the lookout for others with the same idea – AMD, owner of graphically savvy ATI, is set to release their Yukon platform later in the year.