NetbookShow

Back at Computex several months ago we found an unexpected ASUS netbook hanging out in the corner of the ASUS booth – The Eee PC 1015T. Instead of the usual Intel Atom / ION parts the 1015T sports AMD / ATI parts – the lowest end AMD Nile – Athlon II Neo K125 processor and ATI Radeon HD 4200 graphics. A combination that’s pretty rare on 10-inch netbooks as the only other netbook sporting these specs is the Acer Aspire 521. Looks are identical to the latest Eee PCs with a matte lid, palmrest with the new trackpad and with a glossy screen remaining.

The demo model was actually an early Eee PC 1015PN with an AMD Vision sticker on it to make it look like the real deal. That’s the last we heard of the netbook, until today. Netbook Italia spotted a manual up for this 1015T so it’s definitely not dead and will be coming. When? no idea on that.

Don’t forget a 12-inch version of this – the Eee PC 1215T is already up for sale in Germany priced at 445 euros.

The Acer Aspire 721 is one of the first mini-laptops from Acer (or any company for that matter) to feature a new AMD Nile processor. And the laptop is available for pre-order from Amazon for $430 plus free shipping.

The Aspire 721 packs an 11.6 inch, 1366 x 768 pixel HD display and a 1.7GHz AMD Athlon II Neo K125 single core processor. it has ATI Radeon HD 4225 graphics with 384MB of dedicated video memory, 2GB of DDR3 RAM, a 250GB hard drive, and a 6 cell, 4400mah battery.

The laptop runs Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit and weighs about 3.1 pounds. We won’t know for a little while just how these computers stack up against machines with Intel CULV processors in terms of performance and battery life. But for $430, the Acer Aspire 721 costs just a little more than a typical netbook and offers a higher resolution display, higher performance graphics, and a version of Windows that isn’t crippled. As long as the processor is at least as fast as a typical Atom chip, this notebook seems like it could be a pretty good deal.