I love when competition really kicks in, especially in a tight market.

Up until now Intel has had the netbook market to themselves, but with AMD doing the processor and potentially graphics to rival ION and the ARM based systems coming on stream it looks like the second half of 2009 will be very exciting again for netbooks.

All I want is the best tech for less than £200, no bigger than 10” screen otherwise I will compare it to a proper notebook.

I'm bloody glad I bought my 8.9 inch eee when I did as they're all phasing out screens this size. Perhaps I should buy another one to replace it when it dies of old age before all the stock vanishes :)

I can agree to a point as the 10" isn't quite ultra portable BUT I'm currently using my NC10 as my main computer at home it does everything I need and 10" is just about usable for most applications where <9" isn't. So for a bit extra cash I get low power consumption and a flexible unit, could do with being around £250 though :-)

is the eeePC 701. Anything larger is a supernetbook or a very small laptop / notebook (laptot?).

It's about the size of a book, connects to the net and- at least in its earlier times- had a pretty big geeky following, full of people adding functionality and even soldering stuff to the motherboard to make things smaller and make them fit better.

Plus it had its own OS (well, distro) so it was fairly justifiable to separate it from the rest of the market. Now everything's running XP and have (relatively) massive screens the whole thing just seems... well, a bit rubbish. I predict there'll be an ultra-pricey "Apple" netbook within a few months. I mean it's not like they're against charging a premium for lower-specced hardware.

I couldn't agree more mate - I'd love to meet the cretin who decided that 11"+ screens were a good idea on these class of machines. Yes, I'd love to meet him/her ... and give 'em a poke on the snozz!

Anyone know where there's a stock of Acer Aspire One's going cheap (other than the Acer Outlet of course!) ?

I'd like to see AMD's effort in the netbook arena - the more players the better, (keeps the costs down which is good for us buyers).

I will take issue though slightly with the bit in the article about netbook owners being power consumption sensitives. After all, aren't we _all_ supposed to be doing our bit to save the planet - so a desktop cpu that drew <20W when doing sod all would be welcome in my PC at least. ;)

I'm supposing you're in the UK, in which case this won't help much...

CompUSA.com keeps selling 8.9" Acer "netbooks" for around $200 (sometimes even cheaper), although from what I can tell they are usually "refurbished" or "recertified" (fine by me, I have bought a few refurb'd things, including an HD TV, and they were always like new). At least that's what they say in the emails I get every few days from them.

"Anyone know where there's a stock of Acer Aspire One's going cheap (other than the Acer Outlet of course!) ?"

www.ukclearancecentre.co.uk had some the other day, i ordered one for the girlfriend, I think they only had pink ones in stock though so might not be suitable unless you want to get in touch with your girly side. lol

What ever happened to those £99 netbooks we were promised over 12 months ago

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1108673/Next-launches-99-laptop-fits-handbag.html

I am an AMD fan, but... AMD says their "Atom smasher" (I like this term by the way El Reg...) will be "more functional" (I take this to mean faster) and that they aren't interested in the netbook market. Reading between the lines, I take this to mean the AMD chip will likely use more power than the Atom (i.e. faster, but not low-power enough to be good for a netbook.) I hope I am wrong, this would not be great for sales of AMD's new chip if it's competing with low powered chips while not actually being low-powered.

Can we please have normal (u)ATX boards for these chips so we can have "desktops" @ approx 20W (screen not counted in, ofc) ? Thanks

More functionality does not mean more power. If AMD has shown one thing previously, it is that they CAN deliver more performance per watt (long denied by Intel to be important, or even relevant). If they say they can do it again, I will certainly not dismiss that out of hand.

http://www.misco.co.uk/applications/category/category_slc.asp?MfrId=37&Nav=|c:3300|&Sort=0&Recs=10

Were available, at least least week, refurbished at Dabs... the 8GB SSD model with Linux. An absolute bargain at about GBP posted. I bought two, they both work fine.

GBP120 posted.