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Pricey
A French retailer is listing Samsung's N510 ION netbook for €499. Obviously, we can't really say it's good value at this price, as you can get a CULV for about the same amount of money.
The N510 features an 11.6-inch 1366x768 screen, Atom N270, 1GB of RAM and 160GB of storage, and of course, Nvidia's ION graphics. This all sounds nice in the netbook world, but for €500 you can and you should get something better. Acer's 11.6-inch Timeline and MSI's 12-inch Wind U200 cost the same, but they've got more memory, storage, and a decent CULV CPU.
We like the idea of having a bit more graphics muscle in your netbook, but at these prices, ION simply isn't worth the bother. The fact that vendors are starting to focus on CULV instead of Atom doesn't bode well for Nvidia's Atom+ION concept. Sure, you'll get better graphics, but the premium is just too much to swallow, as the cost of unbundling an Atom from its godawful chipset pushes prices to CULV levels.
Hopefully Nvidia will have more luck in pushing ION into CULV notebooks, as it would definitely make more sense, and vendors will probably be a bit more keen to embrace it in this emerging market segment.
You can find the listing here.
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