Welcome to this week’s netbook roundup. In this space every Monday I’ll highlight netbook news items that might not need their own individual posts but may still be interesting.

• Black Samsung NC10 now shipping, slightly cheaper — The slightly modified black Samsung NC10 [Portal page] with larger trackpad is now shipping and can be bought for less.

• Dell Inspiron Mini 10 Review — Laptop Mag reviews the Dell Mini 10 [Portal page]. “Dell’s first 10-inch netbook has a compact chassis, good keyboard, and a crisp 10-inch display, but we wish it offered better battery life for the price”.

• New Acer netbook hits the FCC web site — Looks like there might be a different new Aspire One 10″ netbook in the works. FCC docs give a few hints.

• HP Now Offers Extended Battery for the HP Mini 1000 — HP has released the extended battery for the HP Mini 1000 [Portal page][Review]. It will run you $119.

• First look at the Eee PC 1008HA’s Eee Dock app – Video — The upcoming Eee 1008HA has some Asus built software that gets demoed on video at CeBIT 09.

Welcome to this week’s netbook roundup. In this space every Monday I’ll highlight netbook news items that might not need their own individual posts but are still be interesting.

• Dell Mini 10 dissected — Dell support released a guide for disassembling the Dell Mini 10 [Portal page]. Looks like there are some PCI-e slots which will be good for modding, but RAM is soldered to the mobo which will make it very hard for users to do RAM upgrades.

• HP Promises a Fix for Mini 1000 Webcam Woes — HP acknowledges that there is an issue with the HP Mini 1000’s webcam and says that there will be a method to fix it. Apparently the film over the webcam has a lower reflectivity than it should.

• Gigabyte M1022 netbook has a cool dock — Jkk shows us a pretty slick looking dock for the Gigabyte M1022 which has VGA out, USB slots, and some other ports. It’s nice to see a dock for a netbook, but I hope the base is heavy so the netbook isn’t easily knocked over!

• Dell Mini 10 Netbook Officially Available: $399 — The Dell Mini 10 becomes officially available in the US for $399.

• How to fix the dark webcam on the HP Mini 1000 — Liliputing links us to a new video (after the one taken down) that will show you how to remove the film over the HP Mini 1000’s camera, improving brightness.

• First look at the new slim Acer Aspire One — It looks like Acer is planning yet another 10 inch Aspire One, despite the fact that their latest update has just recently been released.

With an even bigger WVGA screen than the HTC Touch Pro2 that we highlighted earlier today, the Acer M900 Tempo is going to be another high-end smartphone to consider if you need a consolidated device. Its got a similar high-capacity battery to the Pro2, GPS and a higher resolution camera. The processor is still an ARM11 device though so once again, the form factor is good but the CPU isn’t quite there. I can also hear the simultaneous cheers and boo’s for Windows Mobile!

Full specifications:

• Operating system: Genuine Windows Mobile® 6.1
• Processor: Samsung S3C 6410 mobile processor (533 MHz)
• System memory: 128 MB SDRAM for user applications and storage, 256 MB flash memory for operating system and embedded applications
• Display:3.8″ WVGA TFT LCD touch screen, 800 x 480 pixel resolution, 65536 colors
• Expansion: microSDâ„¢ Card
• Dimensions: 119 (L) x 62 (W) x 17.1 (H) mm
• Weight: 188 g
• Battery: Rechargeable lithium polymer battery, Capacity: 1530 mAh; Talk time: 3G: 5h depend on usage / 2G : 5h depend on usage; Standby: 160h depends on usage
• CMOS camera: 5M pixels Auto-Focus with flashlight, up to 2560 x 1920 resolution
• Audio: Built-in microphone, speaker
• Communications: HSDPA Category 8/ HSUPA Category 5 ( 2100/1900/850 Mhz); GSM/EDGE: Quad-band, 850/900/1800/1900 MHz; GPRS/EGPRS: Class B, multi-slot class 11; WLAN: 802.11b/g Wi-Fi CERTIFIED® network connection; Bluetooth: Bluetooth® 2.0+EDR (Enhanced Data Rate)
• GPS: SiRFstar III®
• I/O interface: 2.5mm stereo jack / AC adapter, microSDâ„¢ Card, SIM card slot
• Sensor: G-sensor
• User interface: Acer Shell v2.0
• Phone Tools: Phone settings, SIM toolkit, Speed dial, Call filter, Wireless modem, Communication manager
  Add ringtone, CSD type, Voice commander, Connection wizard, SMS sender, MMS composer
  SIM manager, Video Telephony
• Multimedia tools: Pictures & Videos, Camera /Camcorder, Album, Streaming player, Media player
• Utilities: Backup utility, Default Settings, Application recovery, Memory Optimization
• In-box accessories: Mini USB headset, Mini USB sync cable, Mini USB AC adaptor, Battery pack
• Optional accessories: Car mount kit

I’ll try and get the in the database ASAP so you can side-by-side it with the Touch Pro2, N97 and others. Right now though, I think that’s enough smartphone coverage on UMPCPortal for one day.

Acer product page with images is here.

Via PhoneScoop

Welcome back to another edition of the WRN roundup, here is some interesting items from this week:

• Sony VAIO P – HSDPA mod — Tnkgrl of tnkgrl Mobile, has managed to unlock the VAIO P’s EVDO only 3G to allow for HSDPA as well; all it took was a $1 part and a bit of hacking.

• Dell officially launches Inspiron Mini 10 in France â€” The Inspiron Mini 10 has been officially launched in France. Still looking forward to trying one of these out for the unique buttonless trackpad and the high resolution monitor.

• Acer Aspire One AOD150 now shipping in the US — Acer’s second generation netbook is now on sale in the US and for only $350! We liked the first one and are hoping that this one will live surpass the quality of the first.

• SSD Test: RunCore Mini PCI-e SATA SSD for Asus Eee PCs — Jkk does a video test of RunCore SSDs for Eee PCs and sees some pretty impressive speeds. Remember though, these aren’t blindingly fast and super-expensive, but rather have a good price:speed ratio.

• HP Mini 1000 accessories — Brad from Liliputing points us to an HP Mini 1000 [Portal page] site with accessories available for the Mini 1000. A few things are available to order today but the VGA adapter and Mobile Mini Drive still aren’t available yet. Check out our Mini 1000 MIE coverage here.

• Sony Vaio P battery life: Standard vs. Extended — Jenn of Pocketables.net continues here thorough coverage of the VAIO P with tests of the 2- and 4-cell batteries. Click through for a full chart featuring the length that the batteries lasted while running different tasks. While the 2-cell battery probably won’t satisfy your daily computing needs, the 4-cell managed to last just over 6 hours browsing the web (with one hour of that taken up by playing a flash video).

Welcome to this weeks edition of the Weekly Netbook Roundup. Lets see the interesting things that have gone on in the netbook space since we last spoke.

• Special edition Samsung NC10 with larger battery available for preorder — Looks like Amazon is selling a special version of the NC10 with a larger trackpad and battery (5900mAh 6-cell) which Samsung says will last for 9.4 hours. The screen on this version will be glossy unlike the original matte version. You can pick one up for $499.

• Sony Vaio P (VGN-P588E) performance and benchmarks — Jenn from Pocketables.net takes the VAIO P for a spin and shows us lots of good stats on how the computer performs. Some people don’t think the VAIO P is a netbook, but for some reason we included it here in the WNR. Controversy!

• Hands on with the Acer Aspire One D150 – Video — Sascha from netbooknews.de has a good hands on video of the Acer Aspire One D150. He doesn’t seem to be thrilled with the keyboard and says he is disappointed at the quality of the Aspire One D150 considering how successful the original Aspire One was, and that this is a second-gen netbook.

• Dell’s Mini 9 selling for just $249 — who needs a subsidy? — Looks like Dell has cut the price on its Inspiron Mini 9 [Portal page] netbook. You can pick up the lowest-speced Mini 9 which has 512MB of RAM, Ubuntu, and a 4GB SSD. Add $50 and you’ll get another 4GB of storage and Windows XP.

• Netbook growth leads to surge in Windows XP sales — Despite many netbook makers offering Linux flavors of their netbooks, XP is hugely popular, effecting OS sales charts on all PC sales, not just netbooks. “In December, 13.7% of all laptops sold, and 11.2% of all computers were running Windows XP.”.

• More rumored Dell Mini 10 details, colors surface — More information on Dells upcoming Mini 10 netbook. Apparently some leaked information (which isn’t confirmed to be true yet) has indicated that the Mini 10 will be available with two different display options, 1024 x 576 and 1366 x 768. Also contained in the leak is the option of 1.3GHz or 1.6GHz CPU, 3 or 6-cell battery, and something referred to as a “DVD slice” which sounds… interesting.

That’s all for this week. Tune in next time to the Weekly Netbook Roundup next monday!

It seems like we’ve known about the upcoming 10″ netbook from Acer for a while, but things just got a little bit more official. Netbook3G has found details about Acer’s second netbook at the FCC. Among the images are plenty of internal photos, and it seems like the FCC even has the manual hosted. Swing by Liliputing where Brad has pulled a bunch of the photos and put them in one place for your viewing pleasure.

It doesn’t seem like there are many differences between this Aspire One and the original [Portal page] [review], but of course the 10″ screen and some cosmetic changes and the inclusion of Bluetooth. I can’t say I like how the hinge accents have been changed from circles to teardrop shapes. The overall design seems a bit more noisy than the original as well. We’ll have to wait and see how this new 10″ version fares against their original which we thought was a pretty good jump into the netbook market. Acer claims that the first Aspire One is the worlds most popular netbook.

Highlighting the huge differences in the state of cellular carrier markets in the US and Europe is possibly the first ever carrier-sponsored netbook deal. We’ve seen this happen with UMPCs before in the U.S. (Sony UX, OQO) and you can’t walk down the high-street in the main European countries without seeing a 1-Euro netbook deal (the ASUS 901Go being a particularly interesting one) but as far as I know, its the first time we’ve seen a popular netbook get the 3G treatment in the U.S. Be careful though. It’s a trend we’ll see a lot more of in the future and both the deals and data contracts are likely to improve in a very short time.

The Acer Aspire One (#2 in the UMPCPortal popularity list) being offered through Radio Shack (160GB HDD, Windows XP) is normally $500 but for a $60 per month data contract (probably the data connect 5GB per month plan) you get $400 off the price which, if you were looking for a data plan anyway, knocks $16 per month off the price. The problem is here that the market is going to change fast. In the last 24 months in Europe data contract prices have come down by about 50% and the pricing war has only just started.

There aren’t many alternatives though. You could look at the the pre-paid ATT GoPhone MEdia Net plan. Its about $5 per week for 1GB but as it’s pre-paid, you only use it when you need it and are not committed to 2-years of contract. You’ll have to get hold of a 3G netbook somehow though or do a mod which makes the process fiddly and time consuming. Alternatively, there’s the tethering or smartphone-as-hotspot option.

If you were thinking of buying an Acer Aspire and then signing up for a $60 per month data contract before you read this, go ahead. It’s a good deal. If not, think carefully about your requirement and, if possible, try and find a 12 month or pre-paid data deal.

Source: Engadget. Via GottabeMobile.

The good folks over at Dynamism have put up some nice Black Friday deals for those interested in a mobile computing. These will be good through Sunday or while supplies last.

If you are looking for a great deal on a netbook that will be able to handle your basic computing tasks, take a look at the Acer Aspire One [Portal page] [review] which can be bought for $249. The Black Friday Aspire One comes with Linpus Lite (Linux), 8GB SSD storage, and 512MB of RAM.

If you want some serious mobile computing power in a tiny package, Dynamism has the Raon Everun Note [Portal page] [review] for $599. The Black Friday Everun Note is configured with an AMD Sempron 1.2GHz CPU, 1GB of RAM, 16GB SSD, and Ubuntu Linux.

Want something hand-held? You can pick up a well equipped OQO 02 [Portal page] [review] for $1599. The Black Friday Special OQO 02 comes with a 1.6GHz VIA C7-M CPU, 1GB of RAM, 120GB HDD, and Windows XP Pro.

And last but not least, there is an Asus Eee PC 900 [Portal page] for $299. The Black Friday configuration of this computer has the Intel Celeron 900MHz CPU, 12GB SSD, 1GB of RAM and Windows XP.

Check out the rest of the Black Friday Specials page for deals on other products as well. Again, these deals will only last until Sunday or possibly sooner if stock runs out, don’t let this one slip by.