Sure, you may've already downloaded an early Chrome OS build on your current machine, but unless you want it to be your sole platform, and running just the way Google intended, then you'll need to buy the official hardware. Acer's stated its intent to be first with a product release, presumably at the tail-end of next year, but ASUS, HP, Lenovo and Toshiba are also involved in the Chrome OS project too.

A "request for proposal" has already been issued to potential suppliers, such as those mentioned above, supposedly listing the specifications Google would like to see in that first netbook. Google is believed to be working with just the one manufacturer, to build the ideal netbook. TechCrunch's sources are claiming they'll be 3G-embedded, and quite possibly subsidized by a carrier.

Michael Arrington, editorializing at this point, goes on to say that:

"I'd be willing to bet one of our writers' right hands that it's ARM [as opposed to an Intel Atom processor]. And I'd even go out on a limb and suggest that they may very well be targeting Nvidia's Tegra line."

Adobe, Freescale, Qualcomm and Texas Instruments are the other parties already working with on the Google Chrome OS project, so presumably the netbook will contain some components from them as well.

So, which company do we think Google will choose in this all-important talent show? Acer, ASUS, HP, Lenovo or Toshiba, or even someone else? ASUS obviously has strong heritage with netbooks, thanks to inventing the market for it back in 2007, but Acer launched the first Android-powered netbook. HP, Lenovo and Toshiba have all produced some solid netbooks in their time, but haven't quite measured up to Acer and ASUS' success just yet. [TechCrunch]

ASUS will be working alongside the Taiwanese government to help spread the word on the benefits of Android, which the EeeBot would run on. ASUS has already proved its worth when developing low-cost products in its Eee range, but the cost of the robot will be subsidized by selling other services, such as apps, for it.

The potential of this project is huge—ASUS is the perfect hardware manufacturer to get involved in this, and it'd help breed a real apps ecosystem around the robot, which would hopefully benefit the phone OS flavor of Android too. Human-robot interaction, voice control, movement and navigation are all expected of these EeeBots, but with any luck the head honchos at ASUS have actually watched Battlestar Galactica before so we won't find ourselves in a similar situation.

Don't start putting aside money just yet for one of these EeeBots, as ASUS has already said it will take at least two years just to get to the stage of trialling the Eeebots. That's around enough time to start scoping out other planets to live on, just in case. [PC World]

Under $400

Acer Aspire 1410

Starting Price: $399
This 3.2-pound ultraportable is such a sweet deal it makes us question whether netbooks are long for this world. Acer stuffed a dual-core Celeron processor (about double the performance of Atom), 2GB of RAM and Windows 7 Premium inside a 11.6-inch system with a full-size keyboard—all for just $399. Plus, you get 6.5 hours of battery life. Sure, the 160GB hard drive is a bit skimpy, but the 1410 is a real PC you can take anywhere. [Review]

Under $700

Gateway NV

Starting Price: $599.99
The NV proves that you can get a good-looking budget laptop that performs. In addition to four color choices (blue, brown, read, and black), this 15.6-inch notebook sports a fashionable metal hinge and glowing LED controls. Under the hood the NV satisfies with the combination of an Intel Core 2 Duo CPU, 4GB of RAM, and a 320GB hard drive. Our only nitpick is the narrow touchpad button. [Review]

Asus UL30A

Starting Price: $649.99
If we had to pick a notebook of the year, the UL30A would be it. Why? Because this 13 incher is light enough to take anywhere yet offers enough pep to be your primary machine. This 4-pound ultraportable lasted nearly 10 hours on a charge in our tests (continuous surfing over Wi-Fi), and its ultra-low voltage Core 2 Duo processor can easily handle Windows 7. Bonus: 500GB of storage is nice for the $650 price. [Review]

Under $1000

Dell Studio 14z

Starting Price: $749.99
Think of it as the poor man's MacBook—with better specs and sound. Dell's 14-inch thin and light notebook weighs in at just 4.4 pounds and features Nvidia 9400 graphics for extra multimedia punch. But unlike the entry level $999 Mac, the Dell offers 70GB more hard drive space, superior speakers, and a backlit keyboard for $160 less. The only trade-offs are the lack of a DVD drive and the need for an adapter for plugging in memory cards. [Review]

Under $1500

Toshiba Qosmio X505

Starting Price : $1399
Ideal for multimedia mavens and good enough for gamers, the 18.4-inch Qosmio X505 brings serious muscle in the $1,499 configuration, including a blazing Core i7 CPU and Nvidia GTS 250M graphics (with 1 GB of dedicated video memory). We also dig the classy glossy black design with metallic red accents, integrated Blu-ray drive, and booming Harman Kardon speakers. If you want to step up from the 1680 x 945 display to a full HD screen, splurge for the $1,899 model, which also sports 6GB of RAM and an SSD. [Review]

ThinkPad T400s

Starting Price: $1599 ($1359.15 after coupon)
If BMWs are the ultimate driving machines, ThinkPads are the ultimate business machines, and this is the flagship vehicle. The T400s measures just 0.8 inches thick and weighs 3.9 pounds, and it's decked out in supersturdy magnesium (for the bottom and deck) and carbon fiber (for the lid). More important, this 14-incher blows away the competition in terms of ergonomic comfort and performance—when you spring for the 2.53-GHz processor and 128GB solid state drive. [Review]

To see all of Laptop's top picks of the year, click here.

Running on an Intel Core 2 Duo SU 9400 processor, there's 3GB DDR2 SDRAM and a 320GB HDD. Loaded with Windows 7 Home Premium, the LED-backlit TFT LCD screen is a portable 13.3-inches.

On sale tomorrow in Japan, it's set to retail for 100,000 Yen—around $1,132. [Akihabara News]

Actually, the slide-out battery isn't the only change compared to the original Seashell 1008HA (which had a non-removable battery). The keyboard on this 10-inch screen revision has gone chiclet, and there's a new VGA adapter that connects via mini-USB, and hides away in a recess underneath the netbook.

Those other standard specs I mentioned look to include 1GB of RAM, 160GB hard disk, 802.11n Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth. And if pink isn't your thing, Fudzilla also has pics of the faux crocodile skin finish in brown.

It's extremely likely this will be one of several Asus netbooks we'll see at CES in January, and also one of many using Intel's Pine Trail-M platform. We already know MSI will have a Pine Trail-based 10-inch touchscreen U150 netbook at the show. Good times. [Hardware Zone (Update: Story removed) via Netbooked]

The Old Champs

If you remember the HD media player battlemodo, I awarded WDTV Live and Seagate FreeAgent Theater+ the two top spots. The WD is still best for people who want a smooth interface and a hopefully increasing number of online services for streamed media. (YouTube and Pandora now, who knows what else?) It's actually the Seagate that gets KO'd by Asus.

The New Buttkicker

More functional than frilly, both the O!Play and the Theater+ handle every video file I could throw their way, they both read Mac- and PC-formatted drives, they both browse the local network well, they both read DVD menus from ripped ISO files, they both have superb video output—and they both suffer from having stupid punctuation characters in their name. But one costs $30 less than the other, according to Amazon's current prices. Not only is the O!Play cheaper, but its second USB jack is also an eSATA port which might come in handy when you start getting 1080p rips of all your favorite movies, and it has a file-copy function that lets you dump stuff from one drive to another, or to drives on the network.

I had only one major complaint with the Asus: Every time I watched a video ripped from DVD, it showed chapter numbers in a big white font for an extended period, about 15 seconds. Not only did pushing every single button I could think of not help this, but I couldn't even advance from one chapter to another by using the skip-forward button, so why do I need to know what chapter it is in the first place? A shame, but probably a bug that can be fixed really easily.

The Final Score

As I said in the battlemodo:

• If you want a full-on pirate kit, with torrent client built-in and everything, go with the Popcorn Hour (or the cheaper, quirky Patriot Box Office).
• If you want something with a nice interface and Pandora streaming music, go with WDTV.
• If you're choosing something to work with your iTunes collection of music and video, or something for your parents, probably still better to pick Apple TV—and tell them to buy or rent all their videos.

But if you want something that can play a ton of home-ripped video, or stuff you've acquired in some other high-bandwidth way, Asus is a better deal than Seagate—just as tough to stump in my battery of file format tests, with a few extra nice features. That's my best and final recommendation for HD video file playback—at least until Roku figures out what the USB jack on the HD-XR is really for. [Asus]

Great price for a high-def HDMI video player

Plays every video file I could throw at it, including DivX 7 MKVs, high-def H.264, even obscure home movies from out-of-date cameras

A bit larger than some products out there, but not by much

No streaming internet services

Annoying bug that shows chapter numbers in a large white font as you watch movies ripped from DVD

Aside from the phone-control feature, this motherboard will come with support for up to 5 PCIe x8 connections, SATA 6G, and USB 3.0 technology. Unfortunately there's no release date or pricing information yet. [Asus via PC Perspective via Engadget]

Desktop Replacement Notebook: iBuypower M865TU

You want a speedy desktop replacement notebook wrapped in an unassuming, businesslike shell? That's precisely what the iBuypower M865TU delivers, courtesy of an 3.06GHz Core 2 Duo Mobile and a GeForce GTX 260M under the hood. Like the classic mullet, this speed machine lets you work all day then party all night, for a mere $2000. [Review]

Inexpensive Gaming Laptop: Asus G51Vx-RX05

If all you wanna do is have some fun, the G51Vx-RX05 gives you all of the raw gaming performance of the M865TU—it sports the same GeForce GTX 260M GPU—but instead of a spendy 3.0GHz Core 2 Duo, the Asus economizes at 2GHz. While the G51Vx's dual-core is down two cores and about a gigahertz from the iBuypower machine, when it comes to games, the big videocard is all that matters. For a cool grand, you can pick up this laptop exclusively at Best Buy. [Review]

Over-the-Top Crazy-Awesome Desktop: Velocity Micro Gamer's Edge DualX

What do you get when you put a Core i7 CPU overclocked beyond 4GHz, three GeForce GTX 285 GPUs in tri-SLI, four lightning-fast Intel solid-state drives running in RAID 0, and a shiny new copy of Windows 7 Ultimate in one case? Enough computing power to make your Xbox 360 piss itself and run screaming for mommy. This machine doesn't just demolish benchmarks, it rapes and pillages them, leaving nothing behind but a smoking crater and a host of lesser machines. The downside? It costs $9000. [Review]

"Cheap" Crazy-Awesome Desktop: Falcon Northwest Talon

From one of the original boutique PC manufacturer's comes the Talon. Packing 90% of the raw performance of Velocity Micro's $9000 wonder for a mere $4000, the Talon's watchwords are "extreme" and "efficiency." With a new Lynnfield Core i5 CPU and a pair of ATI's hot-off-the-presses Radeon 5970, this rig uses all four GPUs and all four CPU cores to deliver kick ass performance. [Review]

Will Smith is the Editor-in-Chief of Maximum PC, not the famous actor/rapper. His work has appeared in many publications, including Maximum PC, Wired, Mac|Life, and T3, and on the web at Maximum PC and Ars Technica. He's the author of The Maximum PC Guide to Building a Dream PC.

...should we consider $500 a good deal?

Yes and no. The formfactor is thin and quite small—1.3 inches thick and just 3.2 pounds. That's great. It's a bigscreen netbook...which I guess is a small laptop.

I mean, I'm not arguing this is probably the most promising netbook of all time.

But remember when we were getting countless Core 2 Duo computers from Dell/HP/Etc for like this same price? Yeah, they were chunky machines. But what happened to those computers? Where did they go?

I know I'm not hallucinating here.

Yes, the 1201N looks like a very cool little laptop, and I'm pumped to use an Eee that can handle HD video on a beautiful screen and through tempting HDMI-out. I'm not really upset about the Eee itself. I'm upset that the budget, jack-of-all trades laptop has virtually died as we've seen this artificial performance cap put on the budget laptop market whiled netbooks ballooned to $500-$600. Then again, maybe Ions have enough power that none of us will mourn the loss of cheaper, fatter Core 2 Duos. When reviews hit and the dust settles, we'll know for sure.

Until then, read Laptop's impressions: [Laptop via Netbook Choice via Engadget]

These Intel Atom N280 1.66GHz Windows Home Servers can back up to ten PCs and serve all the files you want. It has two 3.5-inch bays for up to 2 terabytes of storage space, with one Gigabit Ethernet port, and six USB 2.0 ports to add more storage or whatever you want. [Asus via Hot Hardware via Engadget]

The Asus G51J 3D is the first laptop to feature NVIDIA's new 3D vision technology, and it takes advantage of a high performance, 15.6-inch 120Hz LCD that, when coupled with shutter glasses (yup, you still need glasses) garnered these praises from Laptop:

...unlike the TriDef technology that powers Acer's 3D laptop, titles optimized for 3D vision give you a great sense of depth without negatively affecting gameplay. On first person shooters, for example, we found it difficult to aim when using the Acer 5738DG. On the Asus G51J 3D, you don't make any compromises in terms of control or accuracy.

For the 3D tech, you'll take a resolution hit (there's no 3D 1080P display option) and pay a $200 premium, making the full gaming $1,700.

Keep in mind that Acer's system, while utilizing only rudimentary polarized glasses 3D, costs under $800. [Laptop Mag]

The increased responsiveness and gesture-based control better be worth the wait.

RegHardware also reports that the Wi-Fi/Ultra Wide Band aerial has been made an external dongle, because the keyboard's metallic body reduced the signal. A planned non-metallic version will integrate the wireless receiver.

At Computex, the Eee Keyboard's netbook-like specs included a 1.6GHz Atom processor, 1GB of DDR2 RAM, 16- or 32GB solid-state hard disk, 802.11n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, HDMI, and battery (no word on its capacity). Considering it's now pushed out to early 2010, hopefully they'll swap in one of those new Atom processors, too. [Reg Hardware]

The thread is only five pages long, but multiple users are claiming the exact same "0xE8000065" error message when trying to sync their data. The issue appears on P55-based motherboards from Asus, MSI and Gigabyte, and it seems like Windows 7 64-bit is more prone to the problem than its 32-bit brother.

Keep in mind the P55 is a new chipset, and unless you're computer is brand-spankin' new or you're the DIY type, chances are you have a setup that works perfectly fine.

If you do have a new P55-based motherboard, Microsoft is looking into the issue. Hopefully a fix for you unlucky few will come soon enough. [The Register via Engadget]

Unfortunately, the guys at Maximum PC didn't have any USB 3.0 devices to run the card through it's paces. All we know is that Windows 7 boots fine while once it's installed, and it gets similar USB 2.0 transfer rates to other controllers out there.

That said, we all know that USB 3.0 is going to be blazing. As long as the card performs anywhere near as fast as we expect from USB 3.0, the fact that it'll be out "soon" and won't cost much is good enough for me. [Maximum PC via CrunchGear]

Maybe all the interest in Android 2.0 got them interested again.

As a reminder, Smartbooks are just Qualcomm's name for netbooks that use ARM-based processors, which are needed to run Android. (Acer actually ported Android to Atom processors for its Aspire One netbook). Nvidia is also pushing its ARM-based Tegra chip for Smartbooks. [Shanzai (translated)]

It has 10 USB 2.0 orifices too. Personally, I'd just wait for a full USB 3.0 board, where every port's USB 3.0. Otherwise, you're just gonna feel cramped and then dumb, when you have to buy another board. If you must have the 3.0 now this slab supports CrossFire and SLI with a pair of PCIe x 16 slots, a pair of Gigabit ethernet ports, and eSATA. Of course, there's no price or date for this thing yet, which makes it a little less exciting, perhaps. As exciting as gimped USB 3.0 motherboards can get, anyway.

[Register]

Otherwise, its specs are the same as the recent EeeBox EB1012. That means dual-core Atom N330 processor, 2GB of DDR2-800 RAM (expandable to 4GB), 250GB hard disk, and Nvidia Ion graphics.

The optical drive is only a DVD-RW, but I can use my PlayStation for Blu-ray. Otherwise, the EB1501 can pretty much connect to anything and everything: it's got 802.11n Wi-Fi, Gigabit Ethernet, 6 USB 2.0 ports, an SD card reader, and an eSATA connection for external hard disks. An S/PDIF connection also gives you 5.1 audio.

What a crazy little box. We're still waiting on U.S. pricing and availability, but it's expected to be €399 ($580) in Europe, and should arrive around October 22—when Windows 7 arrives. [Asus]