ASUS Netbook Roadmap — ION on the Way, No Pine Trail in 2009
Another unofficial indicator is telling me that Intel’s Pine Trail platform won’t be seen in netbooks until January’s Consumer Electronics Show. An ASUS Eee PC roadmap is leaking through the web right now and there’s nary a Pine Trail mention on it. Couple that with last week’s plan from MSI to be the first with a Pine Trail netbook — they again mentioned CES for a potential launch announcement — and it’s pretty clear that the netbooks of 2009 are mainly of the N270 or N280 Atom kind.
That doesn’t mean the ASUS roadmap is boring by any means, however. If all goes to plan — and some of the devices are specifically tagged as in the “planning” stage — we’ll see several tiers of netbooks from ASUS: Good, Better, Best and Elite. Each internal tier is priced higher as you move up from the bottom, mainly because the netbooks increase in terms of size or performance. The Eee PC 1101HA with its 11″ screen won’t be the big daddy after October. ASUS is planning the $499 1201N with the NVIDIA ION platform to power the 12″ display. Some other roadmap highlights from Netbooked:
- The 1005HA-P (10.5 Hour Battery) model will get a higher capacity 250GB HDD along with Windows 7 Starter, when Windows 7 goes on sale in late October.
- The 1005HA-M, as seen in Europe, will be launched with Windows 7 Starter. It has an Atom N270 processor. It has a matte display unlike the rest of the 1005HA models.
- New 1008HA models: The 1008HA-P (Atom N280 processor, 320GB HDD, 2GB RAM, BT, 802.11n Wi-FI) priced at $480 and the 1008HA-M (Atom N280 processor, 250GB HDD, 1GB RAM, BT, 802.11n Wi-Fi) priced at $430.
- Tablet netbooks: T91 has no change, but a T91MT (multitouch) will be released with 32GB RAM SSD with a price of $549. No release date set yet. T101P is mentioned, but nothing new we haven’t heard before: Next year with an Atom N450 processor, Pine Trail and Windows 7.
That last tidbit with the Atom N450 is interesting as that chip supports 64-bit computing, something I didn’t know about Pine Trail until now. I’m at a bit of loss for why a netbook chip would offer that because it’s highly unlikely it would benefit much in the near future. There might be a speed gain with a 64-bit operating system or apps, but support for RAM amounts greater than 4GB would likely be squandered. That is, assuming next year’s netbooks will still be limited by how much RAM they can physically support.
I don’t really like where this is heading. There are just too many netbooks these days and they seem to be having a negative effect on the ultraportable market now. In an effort to compete on price, ultraportables seem to be coming out with Celeron processors and other substandard components.
Go back a year ago and it was starting to look as if ultraportables would finally be produced with some decent components. Svelte but powerful laptops like last year’s Lenovo’s X200 now look slightly out of place in the 2009/10 lineup and this isn’t a good thing.
I just found this on Zdnet: http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=3803
When 20% of the market is made up of underpowered, low-cost netbooks there’s definitely a problem.
I don’t think this is correct;
“Tablet netbooks: T91 has no change, but a T91MT (multi-touch) will be released with 32GB RAM with a price of $549.”
Either that or Asus have found some mystical way of squeezing lots of RAM modules into there netbooks
I’m in the market for another 7- 10″ device and although my Asus EEE 1000H was a fantastic device at the time, its looking a little tired now.
I’d say your right — it’s a cut/paste from the source, but I suspect they meant 32GB SSD, not 32GB RAM.
I heard that the new 1008HA will come with a matte screen, which is great news. I wonder if there will be a SSD option (eg 30GB) instead of HDD.