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HP Mini 210 HD reviewed

Hewlett Packard’s HP Mini 210 comes in a variety of attractive colors, and features a slim new design with a removable access panel making RAM and hard drive upgrades ridiculously easy. The base mdoel is just $280, but for $330 you can get the netbook with a high definition, 1366 x 768 pixel display. And […]

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Dell Inspiron Mini 10 with Broadcom HD accelerator now available

Dell is now offering the Inspiron Mini 10 netbook with an optional Broadcom Crystal HD video accelerator. The decoder gives the mini-laptop a bit of help decoding 720p and 1080p HD video, something which an Intel Atom-powered netbook would normally struggle with. The announcement comes hot on the heels of the launch of Adobe Flash […]

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Adobe Flash 10.1 Beta 3 now supports Atom Z-series netbooks

Adobe has just released Flash Player 10.1 beta 3. And for netbook owners, one of the most exciting updates is that there’s hardware acceleration support for some netbooks. Basically, if you’ve got a netbook with an Intel Atom Z5xx series processor and integrated GMA 500 graphics, you should be able to watch 720p, and maybe […]

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Pine Trail netbooks can handle 1080p HD video – with a little help

Intel’s Pine Trail platform wasn’t designed to give netbooks a huge performance boost. For most day to day tasks, you’d be hard pressed to tell the difference between a netbook with an Atom N450 processor and GMA 3150 graphics and one with an older Atom N270 CPU and GMA 950 graphics. But there’s one thing […]

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Jolicloud adds support for 1080p HD video on Pine Trail netbooks

Just when I’d gotten used to telling people that new Pine Trail netbooks were pretty much the on  par performance-wise with models with Atom N270/N280 processors, the folks at Jolicloud have gone and proven me wrong. Within the next week or so, they plan to push out a new version of the Jolicloud operating system […]

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NVIDIA ION, Broadcom HD video accelerator compared

Intel Atom powered netbooks typically have more than enough processing power to handle day to day tasks such as surfing the web, editing documents, or watching standard definition YouTube videos. But the integrated graphics solutions that come with these netbooks typically aren’t powerful enough to handle 1080p HD video, high definition Flash video, or hard […]

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Quartics QVU video processor brings HD, 3D playback to netbooks

There are a growing number of solutions for improving the graphics performance of low power netbooks. NVIDIA and Broadcom have the two most popular solutions at the moment, with NVIDIA’s ION platform replacing the Intel Atom’s integrated graphics with the NVIDIA GeForce 9400M chipset, and Broadcom’s Crystal HD Accelerator working alongside the integrated graphics to […]