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French news sites Blogeee and Les Numeriques are both reporting that Samsung will soon introduce a netbook with NVIDIA’s ION chipset. The NVIDIA ION platform bundles a lower power Intel Atom CPU with an NVIDIA GeForce 9400M grahics processor to offer better video and graphics performance than you would get from the integrated Intel GMA 950 graphics found on most Atom powered netbooks.

The move shouldn’t come as any real surprise. A number of PC makers have jumped on the ION bandwagon, although it’s still more common to see the chipset show up in nettops and other desktop computers than netbooks. That’s because that NVIDIA GPU drives up the price and takes a small toll on battery life. And two of the things that make netbooks popular are their low price and long battery life.

I haven’t seen any official statements from Samsung yet, so I’m going to label this as a rumor for now. But Blogeee has a pretty good track record with this sort of thing. I’ve put in a request for comment to Samsung, and I’ll let you know if I learn anything else.