MSI U135 product page live now

The MSI U135 is the latest Pineview netbook featuring Intel’s just announced Pinetrail platform. It was announced a few days ago, and now Netbooked confirmed that the product page of this new system is up on the Global official site of MSI.

The U135 is essentially the same machine as the U130. Both contain a 1.66GHz Intel Atom N450 processor and Intel’s NM10 chipset, which features Intel’s GMA 3150 GPU.

Search made for Acer Aspire 1420P has revealed that it is available in the European online stores. As Microsoft showed them off last month there is no more news about the model. But the Model is expected to show up in US first. The other model of Acer i.e. Acer Aspire Timeline 1820PTZ is already making a good market in Singapore and will be sold elsewhere as soon as 2010 starts.

Acer Aspire 1420P is powered by:
CPU: Intel Celeron SU2300 (1.2GHz, dual-core)
Display: 11.6” 1366 x 768 multi-touch
Graphics: GMA 4500MHD
Hard Drive: 250GB HDD
RAM: 2GB

It has Gigabit LAN and 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi. It comes with a 6-cell battery for good back up, Bluetooth and will ship with Windows 7 Home premium 64-bit. The release date for the model has not yet finalized.

Yukyung has just announced that it will demonstrate two new products, the viliv N5 MID and viliv S10 Blade netbook, at the CES 2010 in Las Vegas next month. It is holding the demonstration at Booth 30349 of the South Hall 3 Upper Level, and the company is currently scheduling one-on-one meetings to discuss its latest gadgets.

There is little information about the products, but previous viliv computers have often been Intel-based, but there is no word yet whether the new machines will make use of Intel’s Pineview platform. The viliv N5 MID has a 4.8” WSVGA (1024 x 600) LCD display, a clamshell design, QWERTY keyboard, 3G, Wi-Fi and GPS.

The viliv S10 Blade is described as a MID, but with a 10” WXVGA (1366 x 768) HD LCD display, it’s definitely the right size for a netbook. It has a multi-touch swivel display, which implies it could be a tablet PC like the viliv S7; it also features 3G and Wi-Fi.

There is a rumor that Apple is releasing a new tablet PC early next year. Macrumors.com has recently written about Apple Inc’s purchase of the domain name ‘islate.com‘. This has caused many to speculate that Apple’s new tablet PC will be called ‘iSlate‘. Whilst this is just speculation, The Washington Post has expanded on this story, and highlighted the fact that several ‘islate’ domains have been registered by ‘Mark Monitor’, someone who apparently works with Apple in securing domain registrations (such as islate.jp and islate.fr).

Macrumors.com has demonstrated that islate.com is registered by Mark Monitor, but registration details were altered temporarily in 2007 to reflect Apple Inc as the owner, thereby confirming Apple’s involvement with islate domain registrations. The Washington Post has also discovered that a company called Slate Computing has filed for the trademark ‘iSlate’, in the US and Europe. The newspaper suggests that this is a company set up purely for this purpose, with the aim of keeping Apple’s involvement with the name ‘iSlate’ secret.

The consensus is that Apple’s involvement with the domain registrations and possible involvement with Slate Computing, is evidence that it wishes to protect the name iSlate because it intends to use the name for its rumored tablet PC. A company such as Apple would probably behave this way, although its attempts at secrecy have clearly failed. However Apple has a motive for protecting certain names that have the prefix ‘i’: this nomenclature is synonymous with its products.

Whether or not the tablet PC will materialise next year is another matter, but the cost of securing a few domain names and a trademark costs relatively little to a successful company such as Apple. Therefore, this news is no real indication of Apple’s imminent plans, and it may have secured other domain names with the prefix ‘i’ in the past, without any concrete plans to release products under such names.

We have seen a couple of operating systems based on Linux in the past couple of months be it Moblin, Ubuntu, Puppy Linux, etc. the list is unending. Well, it makes a lot of sense if one goes in for these operating systems to power their netbooks because these operating systems consume far less resources than the traditional Windows. As we all know that netbooks are stripped down versions of notebooks. Most of the netbooks are powered by a less powerful Intel Atom N270 processor with 1GB of RAM and a 160GB hard disk drive. Keeping this configuration in mind, I think that it makes more sense to install an operating system which takes up less disk space and which is light on the system i.e. it consumes lesser system resources. 

Well, Browser Linux, the newest operating system in the netbook market is just the sort of OS which consumes less disk space as it comes in as a 78MB download file. Moreover, this OS is quite light on system resources as it fulfills just a few basic functions. This loss of functionality might trouble a few but, for netbook users who have quite specific needs like browsing the internet this OS will definitely make sense. Browser Linux is a stripped down version of Puppy Linux. It has been built specifically for people who want to use their netbooks to browse the internet. What users will get is Firefox 3.5.5, a file manager, PDF reader, Flash 10, and an audio player (alsaplayer).

The best part about this operating system is that you can easily install it on a USB flash drive using Unetbootin. If you are wondering what that is, UNetbootin allows you to create bootable Live USB drives for a variety of Linux distributions from Windows or Linux, without requiring you to burn a CD. This way a user can run the OS from the flash drive without installing it on the system. A word of caution though, while running the OS from the USB flash drive a user might experience slower boot times and response times. I suggest that in order to truly appreciate this OS install it on your hard drive first. 

The advantages of Browser Linux are as follows:

• Very small size (78MB download file)
• Can be run via a USB flash drive
• Consumes very little system resources (good for under-powered netbooks)
• Easy to use 
• Faster boot up times
• Carry anywhere (portability)

The main disadvantage is the loss of functionality but, as I said before this OS is only for users who have specific needs like browsing the internet.

Foxconn is a name that I have believe you all must have heard before. Foxconn is basically a Taiwanese OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer) that manufacturers netbooks but then these netbooks eventually get re-branded before they finally reach your laps. Foxconn has recently come up with three new netbook models i.e. the SZ901P, NS24, and NS20. These netbooks came into the lime-light when Foxconn made an FCC (Federal Communications Commission) filing. While the first model (SZ901P) made an appearance about two days ago, the latter two models i.e. NS24 and NS20 made an appearance today, through a FCC filing.

At this point of time we don’t have much information about these three models. All we know is that they will have 802.11 b/g/n WiFi, Bluetooth, WWAN, CCD camera, VGA port, 3 USB ports, microphone, headphone jacks, and a touchpad with 2 keys (no multitouch support). Although, you might not find the specs of these netbooks interesting but what is interesting about these netbooks is that they have the FoxOS pre-installed in them which can be easily customized when the system is rebranded. The FoxOS is basically a Linux-based operating system with a Mac like launcher with multimedia, productivity, and browser applications pre-installed. Users can also install Windows XP on these machines.

It is difficult to say what type of processors do these netbooks use but, we can bet that they won’t be using an ARM processor (as per earlier rumors) as these netbooks have Windows based drivers. We will update you on the detailed specifications once we get our hands on them.

Competition never ceases at netbook market. The latest news reported by Digitimes quotes that Samsung plans to overtake Asus in terms of netbook shipment. Right now Asus hangs on at the number 2 place with Acer leading the market for well over 2 years now. But with this news making rounds on the internet, it seems that Asus may soon loose its 2^nd position to Samsung in terms of netbooks shipped in 2010.

With Samsung launching many new models including Samsung N130 and N140 Intel Atom N270 based netbooks and the Samsung N510 with NVIDIA ion graphics, Samsung seems to be in full throttle to move past Asus. Samsung also plans to launch N150 and NB30 which will have Intel Atom N450 (codenamed Pineview) under its hood. Samsung plans to launch these at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) which is to be held in 2010.

With all these netbooks getting ready, Samsung plans to ship around 7 to 8 million units in 2010 with Asus trailing behind with 6 million Eee PC branded netbooks.

Meanwhile Acer expects to rule the netbook market once again with 12 milliom shipments in 2010. However with Samsung steadily inching in closer to Acer, Acer has started to feel the heat.

For Asus, it will be more or less traditional netbooks that will be the major revenue contributor in 2010 with the company making a small investment in netbook segment next year.