Sure, Asus is making waves with its plans to launch a $200 Eee PC X101 netbook soon. But a company named Genesi has been offering a 10 inch mini-laptop for $199 since February. It’s called the Genesi Efika MX. Now the company is working on a new platform that could be even cheaper. The secret is the Genesi notebooks are…

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ARM-based processors have come a long way in the past few years. While the low power chip architecture was once best known for powering relatively slow smartphones and PDAs, we’re now seeing dual and quad-core chips with high performance graphics in modern phones and tablets. Now that Microsoft is planning on making Windows 8 compatible with ARM processors as well…

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Genesi is giving the Efika MX Smartbook a pretty serious price cut. When the company introduced the ARM-based mini-laptop in September, it was priced at $349. Now you can pick one up for $199. The Efika MX looks like a typical netbook with a 10 inch display, but where most netbooks have an Intel Atom chip, this model has an…

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A few years ago Qualcomm coined the term “smartbook” to describe netbook-like mini-laptops with smartphone-like chips that enabled 3G connectivity, always on internet access, and all-day battery life. Then a company called Smartbook AG, which had been selling laptops in Germany under the Smartbook moniker cried foul and said that Qualcomm was violating its trademark. Flash forward to… well, now…

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Last year at CES you couldn’t walk more than a few feet without running into a cheap Chinese netbook with an ARM-based processor running Google Android or Linux. This year, they’re few and far between as companies have largely replaced them with trendier tablets. But I wandered into the Shenzhen Firstview booth this week and spotted an attractive mini-laptop running…

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The Motorola Atrix 4G Webtop is an intriguing system that lets you use an Android smartphone as the brains of a thin and light laptop. The Atrix 4G is a smartphone with an NVIDIA Tegra 2 dual core processor, while the Webtop is essentially a docking station in the form of an ultralight 11.6 inch laptop. Alone, the Webtop is…

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The Toshiba AC100 is one of the first netbook-style devices to ship with Google Android installed. The operating system is typically installed on smartphones or tablets with touchscreen devices — not computers with keyboards and touchpads. The Toshiba AC100, on the other hand, looks like a netbook, with a 10 inch. 1024 x 600 pixel display, a keyboard and touchpad,…

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Canonical just launched Ubuntu 10.10 RC. Chippy from CarryPad happens to have an NVIDIA Tegra 2 powered Toshiba AC100 smartbook at the moment. See where this is going yet? While the AC100 ships with Google’s Android operating system, the hardware can support other operating systems as well — just not Windows, which isn’t designed to run on ARM-based chips. So…

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Chinese PC maker Malta is showing off a smartbook called the T9000. It’s available for purchase in China, but this week the folks at Netbook News got a chance to check one out in person in the US. Just don’t bank on it ever going up for sale in the states, The tablet uses a Marvell Armada 166 ARM-based chip…

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The Compaq Airlife 100 may have made its debut at the Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas in January, but it has yet to land on retail shelves in the US. The device is one of the first so-called smartbooks to hit the market. It has a 1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor and runs Google’s Android operating system. It’s sort of a…

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The Toshiba AC100 is one of the first Android powered mini-laptops powered by an NVIDIA Tegra 2 chip. The low power ARM-based chip combines the CPU and GPU onto a single chip and doesn’t take up a lot of space. It’s also a low power chip, which means it doesn’t generate a lot of heat and that let Toshiba built…

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The Toshiba AC100 is a 1.9 pound laptop with an NVIDIA Tegra chip, a 10 inch, 1024 x 600 pixel display, and Google Android 2.1. Google doesn’t officially support Android for notebooks, so Toshiba developed some custom software for the device allowing it to work with a touchpad, for instance. Toshiba also ships the AC100 with Opera set as the…

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