According to news and rumor site DigiTimes, Taiwan-based netbook vendors have started slashing prices for their netbooks built around Intel's Atom N270 and N280 processors as demand shifts over to ultra-thins. This includes the major players, such as Acer, Asus, BenQ, and MSI.

It isn't clear whether price cuts loom for U.S. shoppers as well, but if you're on the fence about picking up a netbook, it might be worth your while to hold out and see how the market shapes up this holiday shopping season. While the average selling price of netbooks in Taiwan has dropped from around $490 to below $460, some specific models have seen much sharper price cuts. BenQ's 10-inch Joybook Lite U101, for example, used to sell for about $550 but can now be had for around $325, or 40 percent less than its launch price.

And it's not just BenQ. Asus' Eee PC S101H, originally priced at about $525, now sells in the vicinity of $415. MSI-'s 10-inch Wind U100 can now be found for around $340, while Acer's Atom N280-based Aspire One D150 sells for a little over $350, DigiTimes reports.

Finding a dual-core netbook is a lot like looking for the Loch Ness Monster - you keeping hearing it exists, but no one's been able to prove it. According to a Japanese technology website, not only does it exist (a dual-core netbook, that is), but Shenzhen Weibu Electronics will "soon" have one for sale.

The upcoming netbook ditches the familiar single-core Atom N2xx processor for Intel's 1.6GHz Atom N330 chip with 1MB of cache. And the N330 supports hyper-threading as well. If that weren't enough, the new netbook will be built around Nvidia's Ion platform with integrated Nvidia 9400M graphics, just like those fancy MacBooks boast.

Other specs include 1GB of memory, a 150GB hard drive, webcam, and 802.11 g/b WiFi. And as one would expect, the N10A, as the netbook's being dubbed, will hit the wallet harder than existing netbooks to the tune of 49,800 yen, or about $530 USD. That starts encroaching on traditional 15-inch notebook pricing, but if other vendors follow suit with similarly spec'd machines, the next generation of netbooks could get awfully exciting.

Despite tough economic times the world over, the processor market grew by 10.1 percent in the second quarter of this year, driven in large part by continued demand for Intel's Atom processor. That being the case, one would think we'd see more Atom-based mobile Internet devices (MIDs) or ultramobile PCs (UMPCs) show up in the market place, so why aren't we?

That's the question news site Arstechnica set out to answer, and what they discovered was pretty interesting. After failing to find many Atom-based MIDs or UMPCs for sale on the web, Arstechnica took a jaunt over to Intel's online list of MID/UMPC products intended to showcase what the company's technology can do, only to discover an outdated page. Everything listed is based on Intel's old McCaslin platform and out of production, which would seem to indicate that MIDs and UMPCs aren't a high enough priority for Intel to even bother updating its page.

"MIDs are very much alive and well, still are very central to our strategy in the mobile handheld space," said Shane Wall, VP of Intel's Mobility Group. "And we have a roadmap that certainly goes beyond 2012."

Walls went on to describe the MID sector as a work-in-progress, saying "it's what we had hoped it would be at this point. And in terms of volume it's above what our internal targets are." If only the retail channel agreed.

Read the whole story here.