Netbook News

It seems like netbook manufacturers generally aren’t too concerned about specs and pictures of upcoming models leaking out ahead of time. Well, maybe Sony, but apart from that it’s become pretty common for us to see new models pictured and detailed well ahead of their public launch.

Not so with the ASUS Eee PC 1218, however. Not familiar with the model? That’s not surprising. There’s really no information floating around about it. And yet somehow the sleek, aluminum-clad netbook has received a Red Dot Design Award.

…And because of that, you can now see what it looks like. However, apart from the image above (and two more after the break) details are sparse right now.

The JooJoo tablet is now available for purchase in Europe, where you can pick one up for €359 plus €15 for shipping. That’s actually not a bad deal, as it comes to a few bucks less than the $499 plus shipping you’d have to pay to get the tablet in the US or Canada.

But while the price for this 12 inch web tablet might be halfway decent, there’s still a pretty good chance you don’t want one. Earlier reviewers were left horribly unimpressed. And there seems to be evidence that as few as 64 tablets have been sold to date — which kind of makes you wonder whether the company will still be around in the years (or months) to come and whether there will be any support for this product.

The JooJoo features a 12.1 inch, 1366 x 768 pixel display, a 1.6GHz Intel Atom N270 processor, NVIDIA ION graphics, and a custom Linux operating system that basically offers a web browser an on-screen keyboard and nothing else.

The tablet started out as the CrunchPad, a partnership between Fusion Garage and TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington. His idea was to build a $200 tablet for surfing the web. That never quite happened.

Two processors walk into a series of benchmarks… and it turns out it’s a bit tricky to tell which is which. Peter at Netbooked recently managed to get his hands on a Lenovo IdeaPad S10-3s with a shiny new 1.83GHz Intel Atom N470 processor and an S10-3 with the much more common 1.66GHz Intel Atom N450 CPU. And he put them to the test.

While the N470 clearly has a faster clock speed, it’s not that much faster than the N450. And so we probably shouldn’t be surprised that when Peter ran several benchmarks on the two computers, the scores weren’t very far apart at all. The Lenovo S10-3s scored slightly higher on most tests, but actually lagged a tiny bit in the graphics department.

The N470 gets a Windows Experience score of 2.5 compared with 2.3 for the N450. But that’s out of 7. Long story short, in real world settings you’re probably not going to notice any real difference between these two chips. Neither is going to make your computer fly, but both should be good enough for basic computing tasks such as web surfing, editing documents, or watching standard definition (or even 720p) video.

Sure, if you have the choice between a computer with an Intel Atom N450 and N470 processor, the N470 might offer a slight performance boost. But it’s probably not enough to justify paying much more for that computer