Asus N10 netbook — notebook, rather

Ok, so I’m sitting here sick and feeling awful and I’m a little behind on the news. Well, here’s my first attempt to get caught up and it involves the Asus N10 netbook which is now not a netbook but a notebook. What makes it so? Well, mainly the Asus representative who kept saying in a very Arnold-in-Kingergarten-Cop-fashion, “it’s not a netbook!” That aside, we finally have video we can watch of this thing in action. Well, video anyway.

Nothing really new compared to previous reports of specifications. Pricing might be a little lower, but that’s rumor at this point. Still, at the $599 base price, you’re still getting a pretty decent ultra-portable. However, it’s the more expensive, top-of-the-line model, that gets you the goodies.

In the video, the high-end model is shown with the switchable descrete graphics and HDMI port. This is very unusual, be it in a netbook or a notebook, and using the on-board graphics ought to give one pretty darn battery life considering it’s going to come with what looks like a 6 cell battery as standard equipment. They say 6-12 hours in the video, but I’m willing to bet it’s going to fall short of 12. However, you should still expect to get very good battery life out of it if you’re rocking the crappy on-board graphics.

The other cool bit is that, since it comes Vista (that’s not the cool part), the Asus N10 notebook (I’m sorry — aside from the nVidia card and HDMI, it’s specced just like a netbook and has a crappy keyboard very similar to Asus’s netbooks, so I’m finding it difficult to drink their Kool-aid) comes with 2gb of RAM standard. That’s a Good Thing ™ considering how memory hungry Vista can be. Thanks for that at least, Asus. Good decision there.

Laptopmag has more about the Asus N10 netbook notebook.