Mighty Gadget Blog: The latest technology news & reviews in the UK

Although officially not released by Sony yet, Tesco had put up a new Sony Vaio M Netbook for sale for just under £300 but now it appears to have been removed from the site probably due to the fact Sony are keeping quiet about its official release, oops.

A nice little black number the Sony Vaio M if pricing is true will be the cheapest Vaio we’ve seen to date and if you’re looking for a netbook this offers some pretty decent spec and the obvious recognition of quality Sony craftmanship. Inside the 10.1” Netbook will be Intel’s latest Atom chipset the N450(an improvement in speed and power consumption) powering a 250GB HDD, 1GB RAM and Windows 7 Starter Edition.

As said Sony haven’t confirmed it for sure and are still staying coy about it and although it appeared on Tesco the other day, I’m struggling to find it now but surely it won’t be long till it’s in officialdom.

AMD has announced the Tigris laptop platform which will become AMD's "mainstream" platform capable of full 1080p, DirectX 10.1 support and offloading video encoding to the Radeon HD 4200 GPU. The CPU is the new 45nm dual core Caspian CPUs, with speeds ranging up to 2.6GHz which should make for quite a powerful little netbook. Unfortunately though the battery life is only rated at 1 Hour 55 Minutes of active use.

Congo will offer the same HD video and DX10.1 support but use the slightly less powerful HD 3200 and dual core Neo chips inside meaning that you will get two hours 26 minutes of computer use.

Nokia have left entering the netbook market for some time but here’s their first foray into the market with what they prefer to call a “mini laptop”. The Finn’s netbook(should I call it that??) appears to have the specs of a high end netbook but offers a lot more. You wouldnt expect anything less from Nokia though would we.

• The first advantage is this Netbook is made by a “Mobile” company. Nokia knows what people want/need on the move which computer specialists Dell and Acer still havent seemed to get 100% right.
• Most netbooks don’t do HD graphics on their small screens, THIS DOES!!!! 720p – No problemo
• Nokia Claims its battery will last 12 hours. Now I know some of their phones batteries last forever but in my experience some havent so i’ll reserver judgement on this comment till I see one.
• The Nokia netbook no doubt will come bundled with a 3G broadband subscription but it has a SIM slot allowing you to put your phone SIM in to continue surging if your 3G broadband has no signal.
• Nokia have bundled GPS into the Booket 3G, no need to upgrade like other netbooks. Add Nokia Ovi Maps to the equation and you can find your way around like on your mobile.
• It works with all of Nokias online services (Ovi etc)
• Only 2cm thick, but built by Nokia. We all know you can drop your Nokia in the toilet(not recommended in reality) and after a dry out they work. No doubt the 3G booklet will be built of the same solid stuff. Its got an aluminium chassis and a thin Glass Screen frame, just like the MacBook, so it’ll look real nice too
• Nokia have said it’ll sync with your mobile too although full details on how or what it’ll do entirely arent sure but it can only be good …….right??
• It has HDMI out.  Plug into your TV and watch your HD video…….Simples!!

China’s InfoTimes is reporting via Foxconn(the makers of the iPhone) that Apple will be releasing a Netbook. Its reported to have a 9.7” touchscreen and you should be able to pick one up for $800 in the U.S. What price that would mean for the UK remains to be seen but personally, I can’t see it being more than £800.

This is a surprise really after Steve Jobs slated netbooks and said "As best as we can tell, there's not a lot of them being sold." So why the turn round especially when we also said "one of our entrants into that category if you will is the iPhone, for browsing the internet, and doing email and all the other things that a netbook lets you do".

All this is just strong rumours at the moment so we wont know the full details unless its announced. The main questions whats powerin it and what OS is it running. Will it be good enough for Snow Leopard or will it run an iPhone 3.0 style OS? Who knows?

The Acer Aspire One D250 is available on Amazon for £329.99.

The Acer Aspire One D250 is a slimmed down version of the Acer Aspire One netbook with an Atom Processor, optional 3G, up to 2GB RAM, 160GB hard drive and 10.1 inch screen.

What makes the Aspire One D250 different from its predecessor is that it is just 2.5cm thick at its thickest point.

The Acer Aspire One D250 is now on sale in Germany for €379 (£350) in blue, black, red and white, with a shipping time of 1-3 weeks on Amazon.de

Via electricpig

OCZ have come up with a slight twist on the normal netbook. The OCZ DIY Neutrino comes with a 10.1-inch 1,024 x 600 LED-backlit display, Intel's 945GSE chipset, a 1.6GHz Atom N270 processor, twin stereo speakers, VGA output, Ethernet, two USB 2.0 sockets, 1.3 megapixel camera, WiFi and a 4-cell 2,200mAh battery.

However some important things are missing including a hard drive, RAM, multicard reader and an operating system, all of which OCZ allows the end user to purchase as they see fit.

Read the rest of this entry »

We can’t get through a week without a new netbook being released. This time it is the Samsung N310 10.1-inch netbbok.

It apparently will have a "large size" keyboard while keeping its weight down to 1.23kg. The batter should also last 5 hours.

Samsung has drafted in Japanese designer Naoto Fukasawa to style the N310, and this collaboration has resulted in a curvy, cutesy shape as well as, according to Samsung, a casing that boasts "amazing strength and superior reliability".

Tech specs are a bit vague but the N310 will have an Atom processor, XP, 1.3-megapixel webcam,

3-in-1 memory card reader, three USB ports and optional Bluetooth 2.0+EDR.

No word on pricing or availability.

Lenovo has posted images as a teaser for its new netbook, the Pocket Yoga. This is a ultra-wide, VAIO P-like display with a leather-bound shell.

Concept sketches, however, show the PC not only supporting a touchscreen for a stylus but a convertible design that would let the display flip backwards to use it as a very small tablet.

Unfortunately there are no specifications or any suggestion of a price.