"One of the most popular and trendy gadgets of 2008 and 2009 are netbooks. Small, easy to carry around laptops powered by an Intel Atom processor. While an Atom based netbook is decent enough for browsing the web, listening to your favorite tunes and a little spreadsheet action, it obviously lacks that 'next level' laptop experience we've gotten accustomed to.

This is where NVIDIA today will jump in, officially announcing their ION platform. ION is NVIDIA's idea of what a netbook, HTPC or mini-PC should be like. They take the Atom processor series, and planted it onto their GF9400M chipset with embedded graphics processor.

The result are pretty baffling, as all of the sudden we can decode Blu-ray movies and high-definition content. We can transcode content over the embedded GPU, and thanks to the much faster and versatile infrastructure the GF9400G chipset offers, the overall experience is better and faster.

Guru3D has a hands on experience with NVIDIA's ION prototype mini-PC. It'll do all as described above, based on a Single Core Intel Atom 230 processor, we'll even do so on Windows Vista. Interesting technology for netbooks, mini-PCs and even HTPCs.

Let's have a look at this petite device, sized not bigger than two pears. You can read this article at the following direct URL."