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Asus

It looks like some of the first netbooks from Asus to use the upcoming Intel Atom Pine Trail chipset will be minor variations on existing netbooks. We’d already seen evidence of a new Eee PC 1008P. Now there’s a BIOS file hanging out on the Asus support site for an unannounced netbook called the Eee PC 1005P.

According to Eee PC Italia, the P in both cases stands for Pine Trail, or Pineview, which indicates that the netbooks will probably be virtually identical to the Eee PC 1005HA and Eee PC 1008HA models that are available today, except that they’ll have next-generation low power Atom CPUs.

The BIOS update also appears to be focused on fixes for ExpressGate, which means that the Eee PC 1005P will feature the “instant on” environment that lets you load a web browser, chat client, Skype, or a handful of other applications within about 10-20 seconds of hitting the power button instead of waiting 45 seconds for Windows to boot. Honestly, I’ve never found ExpressGate software to be that useful, but it doesn’t cost anything extra.