Weekly Netbook Roundup 3/30

Welcome to this week’s netbook roundup. In this space every Monday I’ll highlight netbook news items that might not need their own individual posts but may still be interesting.

• Samsung N110 available for pre-order — The upcoming Samsung N110 [Portal page] has began preorders at Buy.com. Though the N110 was just recently announced, it looks like they will be releasing it soon.
• ASUS announces Eee PC E1004DN with optical drive, 1008HA gets a release date – Looks like Asus will be releasing its first ever netbook with included optical drive, the Eee 1004. The Asus Eee 1008 [Portal page] is also reported to be releasing in May.
• Meet Asus Eee PC 1002H — Jkk shows us the new Eee 1002H which has a slightly faster CPU than the 1002HA, (1.6GHz vs. 1.66) which probably won’t display any noticeable increase in performance. They also put a net chiclet style keyboard on the 1002H. Anything to release a new SKU, right?
• Touching Windows 7 — Another video pointed out by the media master, jkk. This one shows how multi-touch support is coming along in Windows 7. It is looking a lot more impressive than what we’ve seen from Vista. Hopefully some of the upcoming capacitive touchscreen netbooks will be able to power these kinds of smooth interactions.
• Samsung Netbook Offers Full-sized Keyboard — It looks like in addition to the N110 and N310, Samsung will also be coming out with the N120 which will provide a full sized laptop keyboard while retaining the standard 10.1 inch screen size. This seems counter-intuitive to the very well received keyboard on the Samsung NC10, and may be another blur to consumers who already might have trouble differentiating the difference between the N110 and N310.