Is the iPod Touch/iPhone the New Netbook?

If you caught the Apple “It’s Only Rock and Roll” event this week then you may have seen the following picture.

Photo courtesy Engadget

If you paid attention to what Phil Schiller was saying while he was on the stage, he was basically implying that the iPod Touch (and I think more so, the iPhone) is Apple’s answer to the netbook market. Sure, he didn’t come right out and say just that, but if you remember that Apple has said in the past that they have no interest in getting into the “nascent” netbook market, then this kind of makes sense as being their answer to it. The funny thing is that the answer has been there in front of us for over two years now.

So, this brings us to the question: is the iPod Touch/iPhone the new netbook?

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Guide: OS X 10.5.7 Retail (Vanilla) Install on Asus Eee PC 1000HE Netbook

Ok, short and sweet. Want to know how to install retail (vanilla) OS X 10.5.7 on your Asus Eee PC 1000HE? Read the detailed forum post by LonelyTV on our forums here (it’s one of those awesome community efforts). No sense in me trying to reinvent the wheel, so click away already. I apologize for not having pointed this out to everyone sooner.

And since I know people will stumble onto this later with questions aplenty — there’s a lot of information in that thread as well as the forums in general. Even though some of these articles get a lot of comments, the answers are, frequently, already in the forums if you have a minute or two to poke around.

Cheers.

P.S. I’ve seen a lot of 1000HA and other variants mentioned in comments lately and all I can say is there’s no guarantee that the steps involved for installing on the 1000HE will work exactly the same on other models. Even though Asus makes all of these and they more or less have the same hardware, there are occasional differences in the netbook models that creates incompatibilities.

Samsung N120 Netbook Review

Update: thanks to an astute reader who pointed out I never got around to posting pictures, I posted pictures. Enjoy.

Samsung N120 Netbook Front

The netbook scene has become something of an Asus show since they brought out the Eee PC 1000HE, and for good reason. In my review of the Asus Eee PC 1000HE, I talked about the positives and the very few negatives, which were pretty much limited to the negatives all netbooks have (surprise: Samsung’s touchpad sucks!), but honestly, it was most positives, and for good reason. Asus really outdid themselves with the 1000HE. Sure, it’s not the prettiest netbook out there, but it’s massively functional. How does the Samsung N120 netbook shape up? Read on to find out.

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Lenovo IdeaPad S12 Netbook With nVidia Ion

Just when it seemed like netbooks were doomed to all be the exact same, chassis aside, Asus decided to unveil the Asus Eee PC 1000HE netbook that has been racking up almost nothing but rave reviews, and for good reason. And then Samsung decided to bring out the Samsung N120 netbook, a 10″ netbook with a 100% sized 12″ keyboard, and it’s good. So what else can come out now that would shake up the netbook community? How about one of those damn promised nVidia Ion based netbooks? Here’s where the Lenovo IdeaPad S12 netbook comes into play.

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OS X 10.5.7 Battery Boost For Hackintoshes?

Update: 10.5.7 appears to be installed and working on my Samsung N120 netbook. At the lowest brightness setting (since brightness control is flaky in the Samsung N120 netbook) OS X is predicting over 7 hours of battery life (6 hours for the LCD at full brightness). This is up from ~5 in 10.5.6. Apple has definitely tweaked OS X for the Atom, or something close enough that it still affected it.

As you may or may not know, Apple released the 10.5.7 update to OS X just a couple of days ago, and reports are trickling in to various sites (including our forums here) and they seem to suggest that the 10.5.7 update adds support for Intel Atom CPUs. Furthermore, it would seem that officially (?) recognizing the CPU, Apple has worked out superior power management that is resulting in a significant boost to battery life.

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Guide: Install OS X on Samsung N120 Netbook

Quick and dirty, this is not going to cover everything, but if you have an hour to kill, you will get OS X working on your Samsung N120 netbook, but don’t expect every last thing to work. Ready to get started? Grab your Samsung N120 netbook, iDeneb 1.4, and get these video kexts and let’s go to work.

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Samsung N120 Netbook First Impressions

Update: Guide to install OS X on Samsung N120 netbook

So I received my Samsung N120 netbook today and figured I’d go ahead and blab a bit about since I have for all of the others as well. Here’s the deal: in person, white looks pretty cheap, there’s a fair amount of wasted bezel space, and it has an absolutely miserable out-of-the-box experience that’s bound to seriously annoy some people (and maybe even get it returned because it’s so unbearable). But, it’s not all bad.

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