In early January, back from our road trip to Vegas with CES show buzz and bewilderment still fresh in our minds, we brought you a video interview with Drew Henry, General Manager of NVIDIA's MCP products. Drew gave us a first-hand glimpse at a new small form factor PC platform that NVIDIA was developing based on their recently released GeForce 9400M chipset with integrated graphics. In this new era of HTPCs, netbooks, nettops and all things tiny, NVIDIA's Ion reference platform for the Intel Atom processor offers the promise of an ultra low-profile, low power device that quite literally fits in the palm of your hand, and thus could be easily tucked away in various small places in a number of different usage models.

We've only had it in our test labs for a few days, but we thought we'd share with you our first impressions and a deeper dive on the performance and features of Ion, which will give you a sense of what lies ahead for the platform, as retail products are introduced to market, hopefully in the not too distant future.