infoTECH Feature

December 31, 2009

Nothing Exciting in Netbooks Expected at Upcoming Conference

By Doug Mohney
If you're expecting to be bowled over by netbook announcements out of the 2010 Consumer Electronics Show next week, think again. Manufacturers are playing it conservative, making users choose between better battery life or graphics performance in most cases.
 
Intel (News - Alert) has already announced its part in new netbook news, with its 'Pine Trail' Atom N450 silicon. Netbooks based on the two chip set are already starting to appear in retail channels, with information on the not-yet-announced HP Mini 210 appearing both at an etailer and on HP's support web pages. How often can you buy a computer before it is formally announced?
 
Since the N450 is produced using Intel's latest processes, two chips are required to build a netbook instead of three, resulting in substantial power savings. Initial reviews are clocking eight to 10 hours of battery life on a six cell battery even with the overhead/burden of Windows 7; heaven knows what you might get if you had XP loaded instead.
 
But, as Jerry Pournelle liked to bemoan early and often, there ain't no such thing as a free lunch. In this case, the cost for “lunch” is supposedly sub-par graphics capability that can't support 1080p video playback, which, in my humble opinion, isn't all that bad because you've got a 10 inch screen to work with anyway so you aren't really going to get the 1080p experience in the little screen. And, Intel's silicon supports 720p HD video playback.
 
Intel is – for now – advising companies to incorporate the Broadcom (News - Alert) BCM70015 Crystal HD chip for 1080p video playback and Nvidia also offers the Ion chipset for 1080p video. However, if you add the extra graphic chip support, you sacrifice battery life. Nvidia claims that if you roll in Ion, you can even replay the latest Blu-Ray movie on a netbook – which is even more frightening if you consider what processing Blu-Ray does to battery life.
 
The extra graphics chips also add additional cost to a netbook, bumping up the price to around $550 or more and moving the “dial” up from an affordable, light-weight device into the “Gee, shouldn't I really be looking at a notebook?” category. It makes more sense in most cases to trade off a pound or so in weight to move to a four pound thin-and-light notebook with a bigger-than-10-inch screen and heftier graphics capability from the start.
 
I expect next year's netbooks to be sexier, hopefully with at least one manufacturer incorporating an OLED screen to save weight and power and maybe we'll see the return of the solid-state drive, or “SSD,” as an affordable option over traditional disk drives. SSDs were offered as an option when netbooks first came out, but the price, power and storage differences between chips and spinning metal platters meant that metal platters won the first round.

Doug Mohney is a contributing editor for TMCnet and a 20-year veteran of the ICT space. To read more of his articles, please visit columnist page.

Edited by Kelly McGuire
FOLLOW US

Subscribe to InfoTECH Spotlight eNews

InfoTECH Spotlight eNews delivers the latest news impacting technology in the IT industry each week. Sign up to receive FREE breaking news today!
FREE eNewsletter