The Amazon Kindle costs $260. The Barnes and Noble Nook costs $260. The Sony reader is $300. Clearly there’s an established price point for what we call an e-book reader. Jumping into the e-book fray comes the Intel Reader, for fifteen hundred U.S. dollars. No WiFi, no associated book store, but it does include a 5 megapixel camera, and a host of features designed to make it the best choice for vision impaired people.

Fudzilla is reporting that Intel’s new Atom N450 chipset – codenamed Pine Trail (see previous coverage here) — will officially launch on January 3rd.

That NVIDIA and Intel haven’t been getting along lately isn’t big news but it looks like NVIDIA has finally gotten up from the dinner table and left the restaurant in a huff. The epicenter of the problem appears to be NVIDIA’s Ion chipset, which provides some much needed oomph to netbook and nettop platforms. Intel wants to keep a distinct separation between its low-power, low-cost Atom chips and its more-capable Pentium chips. When NVIDIA’s Ion is added to an Atom platform, the extra power makes Intel’s higher-end (and higher-cost) CPU offerings a tougher sell.

The worldwide recession looks to have taken a bite out of sales of Intel’s Classmate PC, a computer that was supposed to bring the power of, um, computers to the developing world. Since governments have been devoting resources (read: money) to fighting the recession, they have less money to buy “superfluous” items like computers for kids.

While there are certainly fewer interfaces around today on the average computer than there were a decade ago, there are still too many. It’s all just data, why should it matter what kind of pipe it goes down? As long as it goes both was and can handle the bandwidth you need it to, you’re golden. Intel’s pushing down that road with Light Peak, though the ultimate end of it is, obviously, obsoleting the USB standard that they helped establish. In an interesting wrinkle, however, it appears that no one less than Apple (king of irritating alternative interfaces) has been prodding Intel into action for years now.

While the latest in motherboard news may not be particularly thrilling, if you’re planning on building a PC any time soon (or just ordering one), it pays to be aware of what’s out there. I’m going to be putting something together myself in a few months, after these boards have clashed for a while and a clear victor remains, and while I’m not yet decided on AMD vs Intel, if it’s the latter I’ll definitely be running a P55.

The first reviews are hitting the net. Check ‘em out.

There is exactly one 800-pound gorilla in the CPU arena, and that’s Intel. But the company, which controls about 80% of the global CPU market, is soon getting some serious competition from Japan. A pool of Japanese companies has decided to team up and produce a made-in-Japan CPU that’s supposed to rival Intel’s products.

The CPU will be jointly developed by Fujitsu, Renesas, NEC, Canon, Panasonic, Hitachi and other companies from Japan. It will be used in a range of consumer electronics, servers, robots and cars and it’s “green”. The CPU adopts itself dynamically to the amount of data being processed, resulting in energy savings of up to 30% when compared to the power consumed at normal times.

A veritable cornucopia of ultra-thin laptops is expected from the likes of Asus, Acer, and MSI in the near future. The computers will use Intel’s forthcoming low and ultra-low voltage Penryn CPUs, the Celeron 743 and the SU2300.

Intel’s apparently putting the kibosh on orders for its super low-voltage Z-series Atom processors. The Z-series chips can be found mostly in UMPCs and MIDs but had also made their way into various netbooks like the 12-inch Dell Mini series and the Acer Aspire One 751h, to name a few, as they provided a nice loophole to the “no screens over 1024×600 resolution” rule.

Hot damn, netbooks are about to get a bit more useful. Apparently Intel has backed off on the whole low-resolution netbook screen thing. Previously, computers containing N-series Intel processors (Atom N270, N280, etc.) could only have screen resolutions up to 1024×600.

Even though Nokia and Intel were both relatively tight-lipped yesterday about the actual hardware products that’ll spring forth from their new joint-venture, rumors are already circulating that Nokia has placed orders with Quanta and Compal, Taiwan’s number one and two netbook/smartbook manufacturers, respectively.

Looks like Intel is about to break into the mobile phone arena in a big way. According to Bloomberg, Intel and Nokia have struck a deal to include Intel CPUs in future Nokia handsets.

In my youth, all those long years ago, I kept up with hardware — specifically CPUs — a lot more than I do now. Of course, it was easy when there was only the 486, 486DX, 486SX and 486SLC CPUs to keep track of. Now we have a mind numbing array of CPUs and codenames: Core, Core 2, Core 2 Duo, Celeron, Atom, Xeon, Conroe, Kentsfield, Yorkfield, Lions and Tigers and Bears oh my! Intel recognizes that they’re confusing customers with all of these nonsense words, and they’re working to streamline the product line.

Up and at them! Guess what’s coming this Rocktober? New Atom CPU. The N450 will replace the N270, according to DigiTimes. The N270 will still be available to manufacturers until the first half of next year but the N450 will start appearing later this year for a nice, technological cross-fade, if you will.

AMD CEO Dirk Meyer recently revealed that his “company is currently developing a platform that features lower-power, smaller-sizes, more complete functionality, and a cheaper price than Intel’s Atom for netbooks,” according to DigiTimes. Sounds great. The fact that AMD owns ATI should make for an awesome mish-mash of processors and graphics. So let’s start rolling these things out, eh?

Whoops, not so fast. The platform won’t be ready until next year.

Late last year we reported that a company named Psion was gearing up for some legal action in order to defend products it had called the “Netbook” and “Netbook Pro” back in the early part of the decade.

Psion initially sent out cease and decist letters to various websites in the UK, demanding that references to “netbook” or “netbooks” be removed, and then later got into a legal scuffle with Dell, Intel, and others who had been using the term “netbook” in marketing literature.

It looks like this whole situation may finally be behind us now, as an “amicable agreement” has been reached between Psion and Intel: