We may see Lenovo netbooks packing NVIDIA and VIA chips pretty soon here. Digitimes is reporting that “Lenovo plans to launch 11.6-inch and 12.1-inch netbooks combining Intel’s Atom processor and Nvidia’s Ion platform in the second quarter of this year.”
Lenovo’s apparently considering a 13-inch Ion model as well and already has plans to release a 12-inch VIA-based netbook (presumably the Nano). This is all good news for those of us who want to play games and watch HD videos without a hitch, as NVIDIA’s Ion chip is much, much more powerful than Intel’s standard 945G graphics.
[via jkOnTheRun]
The interesting part in this report is not only that Lenovo wants to use the Ion platform but the planned netbook sizes.
Netbooks started out as 7” miniaturized, stripped down notebooks and then gained in size. Today’s successful models are mostly 10”. There have been 12” and 13” inch notebooks all the time. Most of them have been quite expensive, such as Lenovo’s X300 or Apple’s MacBook.
There is a niche to be conquered. Lenovo seems to plan on just doing that. The hard point in doing so will be pricing and features. Somehow there need to be features that distinguish these big sized netbooks from their larger siblings, the notebooks.