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.