Acer Aspire One D270 Netbook Shipping Soon
Notebook Italia spotted a whole bunch of European vendors tossing up D270 product pages, most of which have it priced at around 250 euros (about $325 USD). But it's not just showing up in Europe. Adorama, a store in New York City best known for its photography equipment, is also listing the D270, priced at $280 before shipping (no mention of when it will ship).
The Aspire One D270 is a 10.1-inch netbook flaunting an Intel Atom N2600 processor (1.6GHz, dual-core), 1GB of DDR3 memory, 320GB hard drive, 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi, 6-cell battery, and Windows 7 Starter. The star of the show, of course, is Cedar Trail.
Source: Intel
One of the big advantages of the Atom N2600 chip over previous generation Atom processors is reduced power consumption, which is partially the result of moving to a 32nm manufacturing process (down from 45nm). Graphics also get a boost, bumping up from an Intel GMA 3100 clocked at 200MHz to a PowerVR SGX 545 clocked at 400MHz, resulting in a better than 2x GPU performance improvement, according to Intel. Finally, Cedar Trail adds support for DDR3-800/1066 memory, whereas Pinetrail topped out at DDR3-667. It's a minor improvement, but combined with everything else, it should help keep netbooks relevant for the foreseeable future, or so Intel hopes.