No more Netbooks from Acer and ASUS this year

Intel has pushed back the release of its upcoming “Pine trail” Atom chip so that its release won’t affect the release cycle of the existing Atom based netbooks, but it looks like things ended up on the wrong side of the expectation line. This resulted in Acer and ASUS pushing back all of their newer netbook plans from Fall 2009 to the first half of 2010.

The newest netbooks in the Aspire One and Eee PC lineup were apparently based on the newer Intel platform, which had improved power efficiency and heat dissipation along with integrating the memory controller and the graphics processor into the the CPU die. This would boost the processing power of the overall platform, and make it somewhat more competitive to NVIDIA’s Ion platform, that combines the Atom with NVIDIA GeForce 9400M GPU giving it HD capability.

It isn’t clear that if these companies would still be shipping the ARM based Android netbooks they had announced earlier, or will they share the same fate as the rest of the netbook line. To make up for the gaps in the inventory, Acer would be focusing on ultra portable notebooks while ASUS would be working on a new Eee PC lineup of touch enabled notebooks to coincide with the Windows 7 release – something that has already gained my interest.