Intel has been gearing up to release the Atom N450 or “Pinetrail” since late last year. The manufacturers had a whole slew of netbooks ready for release between January 4 (when the big electronics show CES opened) and January 11 of 2010 (when it’s ok to sell all the new Atom N450 based netbooks). Information was very scarce last year due to a press release embargo and probably the desire to sell of old-stock Atom N270/N280 netbooks.

Here is an extremely useful, albeit technical, review of this particular Asus model AND of the Atom N450 on which it is based (if the link gets edited out by Amazon, go to anandtech and search for Asus 1005PE):

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Please note that Amazon already has a less expensive Asus, the 1001P, listed on the website, in two versions as well, a more expensive Win 7 Starter edition with 250 gb hard drive and a less expensive Win XP edition with 160 gb harddrive:

ASUS Eee PC Seashell 1001P-PU17-BK 10. 1-Inch Black Netbook – Up to 11 Hours of Battery Life

ASUS Eee PC Seashell 1001P-MU17-BK 10. 1-Inch Black Netbook – Up to 11 Hours of Battery Life

The main difference is 3 extra hours of battery life, but there may be other feature diffences such as wirless n and bluetooth support.

I am thinking about getting the Win XP version of the 1001p which is quite a bargain. While Win 7 Starter actually runs quite well on these netbooks, and has a few nice features, Win XP is still slightly faster and less of a resource hog. To get my current Win 7 netbooks to match Win XP, I have to do a lot of adjusting (turning off auto indexing, turning off auto disk defrag, choosing Windows Classic theme instead of Win 7) and Win XP is still slightly faster. My main hope in getting a new N450 netbook would be that elusive grail of netbook owners, decent Hulu and YouTube performance (believe it or not, I can watch DVD’s and h. 264 high rez content, but not the stinkin’ Hulu and YouTube content except at low rez, not-full-screen mode).

Early reports are that the N450 has about a 10% performance increase over the last generation Atom netbooks, and a 20% battery life increase, but as always YMMV.

THERE ARE TWO IMPORTANT things you need to know:

1. It’s very likely in the next two weeks, netbooks are going to come out with the Broadcom HD chip in them, for $30 extra, which will allow high def output, all the way up to Blue Ray quality, and also an HDMI port to allow easy hookup to your living room tv. This would mean high quality streaming video on an external display. This is probably the single biggest reason to wait.

2. Even if high def video isn’t important to you, Intel is supposed to be releasing a 1. 8 ghz version of the Atom in February or March, and given the cycle of aggressive product adoption and pricing, the extra performance might be worth waiting for.

Your budget for one of these, by the way, should be about three duckbills for a basic model like the 1001P and no more than four duckbills for an Atom based netbook with some bells and whistles.

And if your machine doesn’t come with 2gb of system memory, while single applications run well under Win 7 and two applications run well simultaneously under Win XP, you should budget for an upgrade to the maximum permitted 2gb at some point.

Oh by the way, I rummaged around on the Intel website and also found out that the old N270/N280s only support 32 bit Windows but the new N450 supports 64 bit, which is really cool.
Rating: 5 / 5