And don't forget about Moblin
Regarding pricing and availability, Intel has yet to offer precise guidance. "We're expecting to see new product in Q4: a single core one for netbook and a dual core one for nettops," said Weber. "Pricing will be driven by demand range."
Weber was quick to point out, however, that its operating system designed specifically for Atom - Moblin - has just had v2.0 released and the beta is available for download.
"Moblin is in optimised version of the Linux OS, offering things like quick boot technology and fast web loads as well as supporting many codecs," said Weber. However, he also revealed that close to 90 percent of netbooks are using Windows so we asked him why Intel was bothering with Moblin.
"We have a range of products using this platform, e.g. MIDs, and by optimising the system we can make the platform shine even more," said Weber. "People have been shipping products with Linux since the beginning of the year."
It will be interesting to see whether consumers remind themselves of the original point of netbooks - that they were small, cheap and had long battery lives - or whether there continues to be demand for systems using the Atom processor, but which deviate from those roots. And perhaps Lenovo's hesitation over offering ION netbooks to the European market is indicative of this dilemma.
