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Asus N10 Review — the First Netbook For Gaming 126

Kim Hawley writes "Mobile Computer has a review of another new netbook from Asus. The N10 comes from Asus’ notebook division rather than its Eee PC division, and has an impressive specification. Most notable are the ExpressCard/34 slot and switchable nVidia GeForce 9300M graphics, and the video shows the N10 playing Call of Duty 4 very smoothly. Pre-orders in the US are around $600 – about the same as the Eee PC 1000. The N10 is closer to a traditional laptop than a true netbook, though – is feature-creep killing this new market already?"
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Asus N10 Review — the First Netbook For Gaming

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  • by compumike ( 454538 ) on Friday September 26, 2008 @06:09PM (#25172265) Homepage

    From TFA:

    In addition to the same so-so Intel 945 graphics found on other netbooks, the N10 also has a discrete nVidia GeForce 9300M graphics chipset - enabled with the flick of a switch (and a reboot)

    Very strange feature, definitely the first I've heard of this. You would really think that they could be able to power down enough of the 9300M to compare with the 945. But I guess they did the math and it makes sense to include two separate graphics controllers?

    Seems like a pain to have to reboot to play games... but I guess I already do that between Debian/Windows. :-/

    --
    Hey code monkey... learn electronics! Powerful microcontroller kits for the digital generation. [nerdkits.com]

    • by Zardus ( 464755 ) <yans@yancomm.net> on Friday September 26, 2008 @06:14PM (#25172323) Homepage Journal

      The tech's been around since the beginning of the year at least. I first ran across this while shopping for a new laptop in February -- some of the Sony Vaio models had come out with it by then. Now a few other people have it as well (obviously). From what I understand, it makes a pretty decent impact on battery life.

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by HTH NE1 ( 675604 )

      Seems like a pain to have to reboot to play games...

      It seems retro to me... sonny.

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by BoChen456 ( 1099463 )
      This feature has been available on Sony SZ laptops for quite a few years now.
    • by Sancho ( 17056 ) * on Friday September 26, 2008 @07:14PM (#25172827) Homepage

      Seems like a pain to have to reboot to play games... but I guess I already do that between Debian/Windows. :-/

      That's not how I'd use it. Most of the time, I have my notebook plugged into an outlet, so I'd just use the power-hungry card. I'd reboot any time I plan on using the machine away from an outlet for an extended period of time.

    • by Khyber ( 864651 )

      It's called an MXM slot, and HP laptops have had them for a couple years, now. Their business notebooks like the nx9420 had upgradable graphics cards.

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by KDR_11k ( 778916 )

      Especially since it was possible to have two 3d cards in a PC in the past, I had an Ati 3d Charger and a 3DFX Voodoo in the same system and almost always got a drop down box which one to use (modern games still have it, in case you ever wondered why there's a dropdown box with "primary graphics driver: <card name>" in the setup).

    • You would really think that they could be able to power down enough of the 9300M to compare with the 945. But I guess they did the math and it makes sense to include two separate graphics controllers?

      Well, that's even more weird because the current tendency is to put the same brand of chip both on the mother board *AND* on the discrete GFX card. So that the discrete chip and the motherboard chip can collaborate in SLI / CrossFire when the extra power is needed instead of one of the two sitting idle. (Called Hybrid CrossFire and PowerXpress [wikipedia.org] by ATI, and Hybrid SLI [wikipedia.org] by nVidia)

      Seems like a pain to have to reboot to play games... but I guess I already do that between Debian/Windows. :-/

      It's even more weird as usually the same-brand chipset+GPU combination tend to have driver support for on-the-fly switch between chip

    • Re: (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      The Intel 945 is an EXTREMELY WEAK integrated GPU. It's only with the x3100 series (hobbled by bad drivers) and more recent integrated chipsets that Intel has managed to produce any sort of reasonably acceptable results. i.e. while Intel may do OK at designing CPUs they, apparently, can't design a GPU to save their lives which would make sense that their pushing for more graphics processing back on CPUs, especially since their hauking >=2 core CPUs in which the beyond one core the rest usually have litt

    • Seems like a pain to have to reboot to play games... but I guess I already do that between Debian/Windows. :-/

      I wonder if the limitation comes from the BIOS or the operating system, ive always been disapointed in the need to reboot (as far as i could figure it out) to switch from a radeon based system to an flgrx based one, perhaps having 2 actual chips could push developers to find a way to change the graphics driver without restarting the system and just require an X restart or better just a new X session. hell given that their using separate chips wouldn't it be possible (but not easy) to boot up the nvidia card

  • wow (Score:5, Insightful)

    by atari2600 ( 545988 ) on Friday September 26, 2008 @06:12PM (#25172305)

    I personally feel laptops aren't good enough for serious gaming. Even though you connect a mouse, the keyboard still cannot match up to a regular size keyboard. There is the issue of heat and needing to be hooked up for max CPU freq and display brightness. Don't get me wrong - I love gaming laptops - they make great machines for development and running VMware images but in general I laugh at the idea of gaming laptops (upgrades? *smirk*).

    Gaming netbook though in my opinion borders on ridiculous. The N10 has a 10.2" screen. Checking the AH in wow sure. Using counterstrike as an expensive chat client while you idle in the start zone? Sure. Playing Solitaire and Bejewelled? Sure. Serious gaming? F that.

    • Re:wow (Score:5, Insightful)

      by ducomputergeek ( 595742 ) on Friday September 26, 2008 @06:21PM (#25172373)

      I have a friend who has a 17" gaming laptop and on occastion we'll hook up at the coffee shop and play around of Ghost Recon 1. (Yes the original version). I'm usually playing on a 12.1" PowerBook and there is a hell of a difference. He can snipe me down because he can easily see the movement on his screen. There are places where he can be running and I can barely make him out.

      Same if I play Halo on the Mac, but not quite as bad.

      I know, 2001 called and want their games back, but my point is that 17" vs. 12" screens do make a difference..

      • Are you running windows on that Mac? GR1 was my favorite game ever, but I can't bring myself to install Windows just to play it.
      • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

        by lordxale ( 1003951 )

        I know, 2001 called and want their games back, but my point is that 17" vs. 12" screens do make a difference..

        I remember, oh, in 2002 or 2003 I upgraded from my 15" (14 viewable) Sony Trinitron CRT. Part of the reason I was hanging on to it for so long was because it was easy to take to LAN parties (easy, relatively speaking). Me and my friends were diehard Quake III players back then. Most of my friends had at least 17" monitors, and a couple had 19" monitors. Let me tell you, I wasn't terrible at Q3A with the Trinitron, but when I upgraded to a 19" Viewsonic CRT, the next LAN was totally a night and day show

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by harry666t ( 1062422 )

        > I know, 2001 called and want their games back

        I really love the games from before ~5 years ago. Top-down GTAs, Jedi Knight series, Q3... Say, you can be a serious gamer even with a GeForce 2. You just play games that were released before GeForce 2 was on the market. It isn't like a game that was absolutely brilliant (Diablo 2 for example) suddenly became something less just because a few new ones were released in the meantime.

        The most important factor in games is the fun factor, and there are thousands

        • Re: (Score:1, Insightful)

          by Anonymous Coward

          My point precisely. I have got a 250 HDD for the laptop, and now I keep installed a lot of games that I liked (GTA3, Thief, Deus Ex, Jedi Knight, Psychonauts, etc). The laptop (X1600 card) runs them like a breeze, and it's nice to always have them there, be able to fire them up and have a walk around.

          Crysis probably won't run. Who cares.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      True, I normally prefer a desktop for gaming, but some people enjoy using a laptop for everything. Especially with companies starting to cater to this market, coming up with technologies like this.

      Plus, laptops are awesome for LAN parties (less power consumption, smaller size, etc)
      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by strabes ( 1075839 )

        but some people enjoy using a laptop for everything

        Most college students who travel great distances to their schools, like myself, have laptops. I'm not a gamer (though I do enjoy the occasional game of Halo), but bringing a desktop & monitor cross country seems kind of inconvenient, regardless of how much of a gamer one is.

    • Re: (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Hatta ( 162192 )

      For someone with the username 'atari2600', you have an odd idea of what constitutes serious gaming. Any netbook should have enough power to run any atari 2600, 8 bit, 16 bit, and many DOS games. There are a lot of hardcore SHMUPs, RPGs, and platform games you can play on a netbook. Why does this not constitute "serious" gaming?

      IMO any serious gamer cares less about graphics than gameplay. Have you played Elite? Ultima IV? Sam & Max? X-Com UFO Defense? These are all serious games that you can play

      • I believe that in the context of computers, serious gaming is running the latest games and pushing the hardware and, as a bonus, you might get a good plot. That is why gaming PCs and laptops are extremely expensive. Netbooks and gaming in this context do not go together. It sounds like they are trying to reinvent the laptop and the direction they are taking is leading them right to what laptops are, not something different.

    • I'm sure your gaming rig does real well on space conservation and portability.

    • Or you can do what I do and use a docking station, so I use my logitech keyboard/mouse and 21" monitor. My fujitsu t4010 has a 12" screen, weighs about 3.5 pounds, is a tablet PC, and can play Spore and Sins of a Solar Empire on low settings.

    • Seriously, on a 17" screen with a decent video card (nvidia go 7900gs), I *could* play most modern games pretty well and look great, with my trackball mouse added on (I do that with my desktop too). The problem is, a 17" laptop is like sitting a TV on your "lap." You really can't, unless you are trying to get sterile.

      The real problem is heat dissipation. Until now, only 17" form factor laptops could (theoretically) tolerate such heat. Even the 17" Dells are having huge failure rates due to their insuffic
      • by fastest fascist ( 1086001 ) on Friday September 26, 2008 @07:15PM (#25172833)
        There's this new invention that might be just the thing for you. It's a kind of load-bearing device, deceptively simple really - just a flat surface supported by one or several "legs". I believe in industry lingo such devices are called "tables".
        • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

          by somersault ( 912633 )

          They're called laptops for a reason! Except these ones are netbooks. So perhaps they are to be rested on top of a modem and held like a book.

          • by TheBig1 ( 966884 )
            Well, if you want to go into semantics, they have not been called 'laptops' by their respective manufacturers for about 7+ years now (at least none which I have seen - feel free to point a true 'laptop' out to me if you are aware of any links).

            Cheers
            • Meh, I'd never really thought about it before. Try this Dell link [dell.com]. Notebooks, subnotebooks etc are still all just subcategories of 'laptop', and a desktop is still a desktop even if it goes under your desk :p Some other poster pointed out that some manufacturers may be scared of lawsuits about burned laps and such so that's why the term laptop isn't used as often. Perhaps for the Dell US site they avoid the term completely, but people in the UK still haven't given in to the sue-happy culture quite yet (thou

          • by Firehed ( 942385 )

            They're called laptops for a reason!

            They stopped calling them 'laptops' in favor of 'notebooks' years ago for precisely this reason. Granted I'm typing this from a MBP that's doing a fine job to keep my nuts warm (through a blanket so I don't actually burn my legs), but the computer industry has long since accepted that the devices almost universally are too hot to be marketed as a laptop computer.

            • Actually if you check my post just above [slashdot.org] you'll see that Dell still call them laptops - and you don't get much bigger or more common than Dell when it comes to home computing..

          • Originally notebooks were small form-factor laptops. Any laptop smaller than an A4 paper pad was called a notebook. Netbook [wikipedia.org] is a trademark owned by Psion (or whoever bought Psion) and using it for cheap x86 machines is just plain wrong.
        • oh, you mean like a desk?
        • My DESKTOP COMPUTER is sitting on it.

          I type this laying on my bed - with my "laptop" lying next to me. And before you guys make the predictable "that's all you'll ever have lying next to you" jokes, I first got this laptop so I could play video games lying next to my girlfriend as she does her homework on her laptop.
      • My Dell M170 video card and mobo choked after about a year and a half due to heat. Fortunately, I had a two year warranty. After that mess was cleared up, I extended the warranty out another 3 years, the max I could buy for that machine.

    • It's a matter of context. This isn't designed to play Crysis by a long shot, but the fact that it can run COD4 fairly well (a game that's not even a year old) is pretty remarkable. As I said, it's not going to play crysis, it's not going to be a replacement for a good desktop experience, but it's small and light enough that you can conceivably carry it wherever you go, which is more than can be said for any "serious" gaming device.
      I can easily picture myself completing Half Life 1 on that machine (hell, I b

    • I just replaced a Toshiba X201 series with an Asus gaming notebook. My last one had an nVidia 8700, new one is a 9700. Went for a smaller screen on the new one as I was tired of lugging a 17 inch laptop around the world. There is literally nothing out that I can't play perfectly. Gotta hook it up? Same thing with a pc. I use the built in keyboard most times, occasionaly an external if I feel like having the screen a little further away. Don't care about upgrades. This laptop cost me 1200 bucks. In a y

    • I'm not sure what you consider funny about the idea of gaming laptops. You go home and you use it the same way you use a desktop, by hooking up an external keyboard, mouse and monitor. If you are in a mobile environment, then you sacrifice the monitor and keyboard, but in that situation you wouldn't play at all with a desktop. Most gaming laptops have a 17 inch high resolution monitor, better keyboards and are overkill for playing WoW. This model is not a common configuration.
    • by Fumus ( 1258966 )
      You just need to connect an external mouse. A full keyboard would also help. Then there's the display problem, so you'll need a 24" LCD. When you're at it you could also add some decent speakers.
      Yeah, it will take some space, but if you set it up on a desk, it'll fit all right. And then you could even put the laptop under your desk so that it won't interfere..
  • Hmm... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by fuzzyfuzzyfungus ( 1223518 ) on Friday September 26, 2008 @06:15PM (#25172327) Journal
    It's almost like firms hate catering to the ultra low end, with its vanishingly small margins, or something...

    Feature creep can hardly be said to be "killing" the netbook market, as long as cheap low end netbooks continue to be sold; but one does get the impression that Asus et al. would love for you to consider something a little more expensive. The market that toys like this will probably kill is the ultra-high-end mini notebook segment.

    The high end mini notebook market has been around for years, Sony probably being the most notable. Classic netbooks are a threat, in that they skim off the people who want portability but don't need high end features but might have purchased a mini notebook because they were the only thing going; but they are too wimpy to kill the segment. However, as seems to happen a lot in technology, cheap crap is better at moving upmarket while staying cheap than premium gear is at moving downmarket while staying good. With the vast bulk of 300-400 dollar netbooks floating around, modest upgrades in spec and build quality, like the device reviewed in TFA, are still cheap and small; but are almost as good is the high end mini notebooks of old.

    I'm not predicting the total doom of that segment, some people are still willing to pay a premium for the best; but I suspect that this system, and others like it, really annoy the traditional makers of high end mini notebooks.
    • by mangu ( 126918 ) on Friday September 26, 2008 @07:00PM (#25172715)

      I suspect that this system, and others like it, really annoy the traditional makers of high end mini notebooks.

      This is something that has been extensively and well discussed in this book [businessweek.com]. Traditional companies always have a lot of difficulty trying to compete with new products that come from "below", i.e. have less features but are cheaper than the current products.

      Mini-computers killed almost all of the old mainframe manufacturers, just like personal computers put the mini-computer sellers out of business. Now it's the time for the PC manufacturers to feel the heat, I expect a big restructuring of the whole industry in the next few years.

      • Interesting excerpt, I may need to pick that one up. Incidentally, netbooks seem to be absolutely textbook instances of disruptive innovation:

        "Generally disruptive innovations were technologically straightforward, consisting of off-the-shelf components put together in a product architecture that was often simpler than prior approaches. They offered less of what customers in established markets wanted and so could rarely be initially employed there. They offered a different package of attributes valued onl
    • by KDR_11k ( 778916 )

      However, as seems to happen a lot in technology, cheap crap is better at moving upmarket while staying cheap than premium gear is at moving downmarket while staying good.

      There's a term for that [wikipedia.org].

    • by Mista2 ( 1093071 )

      Well I guess it's because what I really want is the Acer Aspire One I am typing this on, but it would be nice if it had a 2GHz plus dualcore CPU, a faster SSD drive or a bigger spinning disk, and a faster video card and a battery to last the whole of a longhaul international flight.
      But then it would be a $3000+ macbook air, not a $600 netbook 8)

  • Nonsense! (Score:4, Funny)

    by telchine ( 719345 ) on Friday September 26, 2008 @06:16PM (#25172333)

    You want a netbook for gaming?! The Eee does it all! Perfect controller as well!

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QSW9qOM6FM [youtube.com]

  • The Eee PC 1000 should be much less than $600. I live in Europe so I am not sure about the prices in the US, but here in EU it's one of the cheapest laptopsin general, let alone among the ultraportables!

    • I'm seeing it for 449$ USD, so it's not expensive at all.

      Granted this is for the 80GB XP version, but still, you could easily load it with linux if that's what you want.

  • Perfect for me (Score:2, Interesting)

    I have been looking for something that I can develop on the go (needs battery life) as well as run the games I am devving (needs graphics card). This has me really excited. If it lives up I will probably be purchasing one.
  • more of a preview (Score:3, Informative)

    by gEvil (beta) ( 945888 ) on Friday September 26, 2008 @06:32PM (#25172463)
    This is more of a preview rather than a review, especially since they mention they'll post their full review next week.
  • Simply being a personal opinion, I believe that traditional notebooks will see a sale rise in 2009.

    When the EEE was announced I made a bet with a friend as to whether netbooks would shake the notebook market up and turn it a little inside out, and yes, they did.

    But looking at what I feel I would buy when I wanted a portable computer, during all of 2008 I strongly felt I'd get some kind of netbook (I particularily had my eye on the Acer devices), but now i feel that I'd really want a normal work machin
    • I have a dual screen desktop at home, and a laptop issued for work, that stays docked at work. My personal laptop, I don't use... It's a bit much to lug around, even though not huge, and when I do, the screen is too small for me to work comfortably on (15.4"). I'm debating between an Android Phone (T-mobile G1) and a MSI Wind (6-cell battery is why other options are pretty much out).

      My main plans are a portable device for email and chat... the MSI Wind can handle thunderbird, xchat and pidgin fine. No
  • is feature-creep killing this new market already?

    The market will define itself, not what hand-wringers think it should be. If the slightly-larded up Netbooks sell, well then, that's the market. If the race to the bottom, barebones lappies are what people want, then that will be what the market produces.

    Markets don't die, they adapt to what consumers want, not how neato some people think a sub-$500 laptop is for society.
    • Pardon my rant; it is not directed at you necessarily, but I'm so fed up with this whole "Free Market As Religion" nonsense that your little blurb broke my camel's back today.

      Why do people get so pentecostal about it? It's like waxing poetic about gravity or something. --Except Newton wasn't pushing his theory for manipulative reasons. Take a look at the original proponents of Free Market theory; they're in tight with the Reagan/Bush family tree, and now we have Bush back-pedaling on the theory with his

      • by colganc ( 581174 )
        There is plenty evidence showing the current problem is from government intervention in getting banks to make loans to people that are overly risky. The idea of a "free market", what it is, what it means, and how it works, is much older than the Bush and Reagan presidencies. IIRC the modern idea traces back to the 1700s in England. It is not a belief or a religion. It is the historically proven most effective way for people to organize and be productive. Every other system has either not worked or been
        • There is plenty evidence showing the current problem is from government intervention in getting banks to make loans to people that are overly risky.

          Okay, did you actually, really just try to blame the current economic crisis on people who didn't follow the strictures of the 'Free Market' obediently enough?

          That is the most bugged-out bit of spin-doctored delusional insanity I've heard today, --and it's pushing 1 o'clock, so I've already heard a ton of bullshit! "Government intervention in getting banks to m

  • stop it (Score:5, Insightful)

    by PopeRatzo ( 965947 ) * on Friday September 26, 2008 @06:54PM (#25172657) Journal

    is feature-creep killing this new market already?

    Do we care more about having a lot of different options for the user, or about protecting this "new market"?

    I really don't think that every new useful product has to become part of some special "market" just because reviewers and marketing people feel the need to categorize and simplify absolutely everything.

    I've seen too many good, innovative products die on the vine because the PR machine didn't quite know what to do with it. And have no doubt, sites like Mobile Computing, Engadget, Gizmodo, are nothing but cogs in the giant Moloch of the marketing departments and soap peddlers who have created this consumerist dystopia.

    If it's a good product, it doesn't have to be destroyed just because it doesn't fit neatly on a tab of some big box store's website.

    • by VVelox ( 819695 )

      Aye. I second that.

      I personally like it. It is a small cheap laptop with power.

      I personally would go for it if it was not for the fact I currently have a good laptop I use for gaming.

    • by PCM2 ( 4486 )

      Yeah, but it seems to me the whole concept was that these are ultra-cheap PCs that aren't really good for a whole lot of serious computing, but are perfectly fine for surfing the net. Hence, "netbook."

      If this thing is even half good enough for its intended purpose, isn't it sort of a ... gamebook, or something?

      Further, I always thought "gamer PC" meant "tricked-out, high performance machine with emphasis on the graphics card and a bunch of blue LEDs in the case." The concept of marketing a "gamer system" th

      • Yeah, but it seems to me the whole concept was...

        The "whole concept" ought to be whatever consumers find useful. Who really cares what the original idea of netbooks was? That "idea" was only the product of a marketing dept anyway.

    • sometimes it really seems like people are just here to serve the economy rather than the other way around. that's why i'm always baffled when governments pursue policies that are supposed to "strengthen the economy" but which run against public interest.

      personally, gaming laptops hold no appeal to me, but i've seen countless other great products fail because they were the victim of poor marketing. it's sad when marketing/advertising determines the success of a product rather than its technological/practical

    • > just because reviewers and marketing people feel the need
      > to categorize and simplify absolutely everything.

      Oh dude. That reminds me of how I was enraged when I saw a Linkin Park album labeled as "Heavy Metal". Then a man came to me and said that it's only the narrow-minded people who need to categorize everything.

      > If it's a good product, it doesn't have to be destroyed just because
      > it doesn't fit neatly on a tab of some big box store's website.

      You made me want to start writing songs again (

      • You made me want to start writing songs again (:

        Harry, that's one of the nicest things anyone has ever said to me.

    • It's just a matter of the submitter wanting to seem important and relevant so they had to come up with an inane editorial comment/question. I don't think anybody else really cares whether or not you can pidgeonhole a new product.

      • I wish it was only that, dreamchaser, but it's easy to come up with a list of great products that disappeared because the retail mechanism didn't know what to do with them (but we did).

        The Apple Newton comes to mind. How many years did it take for Apple to even try a handheld platform again?

  • Whatever happened to that bullshit from AMD where you could run integrated graphics, and switch over to discrete graphics when the need arose.

    I believe they also let you run crossfire across them, though it was immature and you'd get anywhere from a ~10% increase to a ~20% decrease.

    One of the neat things was that the discrete gpu would be nearly dead when not in use, but would automatically come to life when you needed it.

    I guess that all hinged on AMD getting a chipset that was worth a damn to market. Hyb

    • It's out there already, only the Atom is such a compelling CPU that most of the nettops are now using that as a base processor. AMD has a similar proc, but doesn't match the speed, or the light energy use of the Atom.
  • by Lord Byron II ( 671689 ) on Friday September 26, 2008 @08:31PM (#25173507)
    A surprising number of stories that make it to the front page have a rhetorical, leading question. In this case: "is feature-creep killing this new market already?" The question itself begs the question - is this new netbook a victim of "feature creep"? I know that anyone else who cares about logic in their arguments is bothered as much as I am. I wish that the editors would filter this sort of nonsense out before they post.
    • New Journalism (Score:4, Interesting)

      by copponex ( 13876 ) on Friday September 26, 2008 @11:17PM (#25174497) Homepage

      Let's say you have an incredibly dumb hypothesis, but you don't want to claim it. Add a question mark, and you can still say the same thing and you can pretend you're still a news organization rather than the National Enquirer.

      "Obama is a Muslim" turns into "Is Obama a Muslim?"
      "Palin Faked Preganancy" turns into "Did Palin Fake Her Pregnancy?"

      As with all asinine journalistic methods, this was mainstreamed by Fox News, and covered hilariously by the Daily Show. It's supposed to hook people with outrageous and patently false statements to boost ratings. Instead of information you get speculation, which is worthless.

      The last safe haven is NPR. Why? Public funding allows journalists to be journalists and not just the lapdogs of marketing departments. This is also why the BBC remains one of the most trusted news organizations in the world.

  • What's with the terrible no contrast image? [mobilecomputermag.co.uk] Who on earth thought of that one?

    Maybe it's a test for people who want to spend all day squinting at a tiny 10 inch laptop screen.

  • I have long wished that there was a way to upgrade the GPU in mobiles. Obviously something like this would be relatively niche, but then again so are gametops. Certainly the professional market would appreciate this. Does anybody if this has ever been attempted before and what the effect was?
  • How do you `kill` a market? There's a demand for small, cheap PCs. I bought one (the Aspire One). It's great. If people want to produce PCs which are bigger and more expensive then they're not really netbooks any longer, but they're not killing anything either.

    Great way to learn Linux. If Linux people really want to turn people away from Windows I'd make sure they stay on top of all the questions in the Aspire and EEE forums and make sure people don't get pissed off when they have to type stuff to make the

  • is feature-creep killing this new market?

    The key definers for a "netbook" are weight, size and stamina - battery life. And of course some sort of mobile "net" capability.

    As long as these are respected, then bring the features on - doesn't that go without saying?
    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by TheRaven64 ( 641858 )
      And no moving parts. This has a mechanical hard disk which, to me, kicks it out of the interesting category. Also, please can we stop saying 'netbook' to describe things that aren't Netbooks [wikipedia.org]
      • Seriously - Psion? Welcome to this century.

        Wikipedia will catch up with what we all actually mean by netbook, and it obviously isn't the definition linked.

        And "moving parts" is only a preference or opinion - as long as portability and longevity are respected. It doesn't matter if the storage media spins as long as the portability and longevity aren't compromised to do it.

        Clearly portability is limited by shock proof media, but not constrained by it.

  • With Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 on my original Eee 701.
  • by Guppy ( 12314 ) on Friday September 26, 2008 @10:42PM (#25174327)

    I've been considering getting a netbook, and noticed that while most are based around Intel's integrated GMA graphics, there was another unusual exception -- the Raon Everrun Note [umpcportal.com]. Almost every netbook out there is based around Intel's Atom CPU, with occasional Core/Celeron ones.

    This one was unusual in that it is equipped with an AMD Turion64 x2 CPU paired with ATI RS690E graphics. The RS690SE is integrated, but supposedly much faster than Intel's, and comes with dedicated graphics memory (what they call "sideport"). It looks like it should be a pretty good performer for a netbook -- so right now for me it is a tossup between this and the N10.

    • That's a very interesting looking device. What's most interesting is that it's absolutely tiny - smaller than any netbook I've ever seen.
      I'm in the market for a netbook myself, but that one is a little too small for my liking, so it looks like the N10 might be the one for me.

  • It's great that this has discrete graphics, but does anyone honestly expect this to do much when it's running a low-power single-core CPU like Atom? I love the idea of a netbook that can play games, but a single-core Atom is just not up to snuff. It might be worth a look if they threw in one of the new dual-core Diamondvilles, but these things are even underpowered for some flash games.
  • That it can't do 720p video when my EEE 900 can using mplayer. The biggest problem I encounter is that it gets glitchy at times because the SSD can't keep up...

  • For me a netbook is also defined by it's pricetag. If it's cheap enough you don't get worried of thieves, you can take it everywhere. If it ever gets lost, there's no $2000 (vaio) gone.

  • Ah, very nice features, but.... does it come with Microsoft documents, source code, software serials and keygens?! Mine did!!! Now to re-dub Balmer's Windows 3.1 (or whatever version it was) commercial to include these must-have features!
  • My wife has an expensive Vaio with a true 8-bit screen. She laughes at my other notebooks with the dark tiny graphics which just suck for games or even using ms word for extended periods of time.

    Does this unit have a true 8-bit screen or is it a 6-bit screen which emulates 8 bit in software that creates a bad picture?

    Is it even possible to even buy a true notebook with 8bit graphics anymore? I want to know as her vaio is dying and I am looking to replace it.

    8-bit is essential for any game. Any environment w

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