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With new advances like NVIDIA’s Ion chipset and Intel’s own buffing of their Atom CPU with Pinetrail, netbooks are getting to be better and better multimedia and gaming machines by the day.
That said, if you want to watch video on your netbook, you’ll pretty much top out at 720p: the graphics processors in your average netbook just isn’t really up to the task of full HD resolution quite yet. And you know, that’s probably okay: netbooks are really all about being power efficient and a small footprint. But that’s not to say that it’s a welcome change to see a netbook come down the line which can actually do 1080p well. Dell’s latest update to their Mini 10 line of netbooks, the Mini 10v, seems like it’s just such a device.
The Dell Mini 10v has the usual standard netbook specs, including a 1.6GHz Intel Atom Processor, 1GB of RAM, a 250GB Hard Drive and Windows 7 Starter Edition. The big change comes by way of Broadcom’s Crystal HD accelerator, which allows for full 1080p (albeit scrunched down on the Mini 10v’s 1366 x 768 LCD display).
Unfortunately, the Broadcom Crystal HD accelerator only supports Windows Media Player right now… and can’t even handle the latest version of Flash. Support should trickle out over time for other players and software, but in the meantime, the Mini 10v still seems like a great netbook, as long as you can handle the true HD restrictions.
