Hands-on with the Intel Canoe Lake Netbook

Intel SEA invited members of the press to a media workshop here in their Malaysia office to show us some of their latest and upcoming technologies. One of them is this prototype of a super-slim netbook powered by the next-generation Atom processor (Canoe Lake).

Announced earlier this month at Computex in Taiwan is the new line of Atom processors and platforms, starting with Canoe Lake (see previous story here).

The Canoe Lake platform will bring the current thickness of netbooks from around 1-inch to just half an inch. This prototype was specifically made by Intel to demonstrate that capability.

This unit that we tested looked similar to the Vaio X I reviewed several months back — it’s very slim and very light. They got Windows 7 running on it. There’s no brand or label because this was just a special prototype Intel had made to showcase how thin the design can be.

You will notice that the base of the netbook has a raised portion just above the keyboard. That’s to make room for more battery space. Even the ports at the back are bordering the edges of the netbook.

Placed it beside my Apple iPad here and they’re almost the same thickness (or thin-ness) .

Intel promises we should be seeing newer netbook models with dual-core CPUs, support for DDR3 RAM and still allows for longer battery life. The final netbooks might not look like these but expect the newer models to be slimmer.

The introduction of dual-core Atom processors on netbooks might blur the lines between them and the CULV line (which sports Core 2 Duo or Dual Core CPUs). Intel names Asus, MSI, Lenovo and Acer as among the first laptop manufacturers to be shipping out newer netbooks with this platform.