Intel has now revealed the specs sheet of its Atom N450 mobile processor as well as the Atom D410 and D510 desktop processors, and there aren’t many surprises here. We all know that they offer little or no performance boost, but they use a lot less energy than the current Atom iteration. Read more…

Fresh off the heels of the Nexus One announcement, it seems that Google is not yet finished pulling off another surprise in the hardware department.

Google has been working with hardware manufacturers in Chrome OS-related matters to ensure a good customer experience when the OS comes out next year. According to a Google FAQ, “The Google Chrome OS team is currently working with a number of technology companies to design and build devices that deliver an extraordinary end user experience. Among others, these companies include Acer, Adobe, ASUS, Freescale, Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, and Toshiba.” Read more…

Honestly, I don’t know what to make of it. It seems that Acer has come up with a laptop that has a 3-D display effect. The 3-D effect is achieved by a transparent polarizing filter overlaid on the screen, which splits images into separate streams for each eye. You would need a pair of special polarizing glasses to get the effect, and if you look at the screen straight-on, you’d get the 3-D effect. Looking at the screen at an angle may actually not show the 3-D. Read more…

We’ll be seeing Intel’s new Atom line, the Pine Trail-M, sometime next year (I hope it comes out Q1), and already the netbook world is abuzz about what it means.

Fudzilla reports that the new netbook platform will consume less energy – about 20% to be exact – than the current Atom iteration. Maximum PC says that Pine Trail-M is smaller and cheaper to produce. The Pine Trail-M is actually 64% smaller than the current Atom! And I thought the Atom is already one of the smallest processors out there. Imagine that.

But for all the hype that it created, what does the Pine Trail-M really mean for us netbook owners?

Lower power consumption doesn’t necessarily mean a noticeable change in battery life.

Remember, the processor is but one component in your netbook. Just because its power consumption has been reduced by 20% doesn’t mean that your battery life will increase by 20%. The other components of your netbook – the hard drive, the monitor, and others -will still consume power the same way they’ve done before.

A cheaper processor probably won’t mean cheaper netbooks.

I know, I know. I’m disappointed too. I want my netbooks cheap. And powerful. But we all can’t have our cake and eat it too, right? I’m guessing that by the time the Pine Trail-M comes out, netbook manufacturers will take advantage of the new processor’s cheaper price point and smaller space to add more components and features into their netbooks. I won’t claim to know what exactly are they cooking up, but let’s imagine netbooks with better, discrete, video cards. Heh, I’d even want a netbook that’ll put a Macbook Air to shame, but that would be kind of pushing it.

But what do you guys think? I’d love to hear your thoughts on this.