With tablets stealing the lime light, netbook announcements are few and far between, but not absent altogether. Later this month, Acer will begin shipping its new Aspire One AOD255 netbook built around Intel's dual-core Atom N550 platform.

"We have enhanced our best-selling Aspire One netbook line with the improved performance and better power efficiency to improve the mobile computing experience for consumers," said Pete Dailey, senior product marketing manager for netbooks. With the new Aspire One AOD255, users are able to multitask, explore the Internet, connect with friends, and enjoy entertainment applications, without worrying about battery life or being tethered to an electrical outlet."

Acer didn't throw us for any curve balls with the AOD255. The standard configuration applies: 250GB hard drive, 10.1-inch LCD screen, 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi, 1.3MP webcam, 1GB of DDR3 memory, and Windows 7 Starter. Microsoft Office Starter 2010 is also included.

The AOD255 carries an MSRP of $330.

Samsung on Tuesday introduced its new dual-core 1GHz ARM Cortex A9-based processor designed for mobile applications. If all goes to plan, you'll soon seen this spunky chip in a variety of devices, including tablets, netbooks, and even smartphones.

"Consumers are demanding the full web experience without compromise while on the go," said Dojun Rhee, vice president of Marketing, System LSI Division, Samsung Electronics. "Given this trend, mobile device designers need an application processor platform that delivers superb multimedia performance, fast CPU processing speed, and abundant memory bandwidth. Samsung's newest dual core application processor chip is designed specifically to fulfill such stringent performance requirements while maintaining long battery life."

Built on a 45nm manufacturing process, the Orion processor, as it's being called, comes with two cores clocked at 1GHz, each with 32KB data cache and a 32KB instruction cache. There's also 1MB of L2 cache to help speed things up, Samsung says.

Interestingly, Orion also comes with an onboard native triple display controller architecture, so that a device equipped with this chip could support two on-device display screens and still have the chops to drive a third external display, like a TV or monitor via on-chip HDMI.

Select customers will get their hands on the new chip in the fourth quarter of 2010, with mass production to follow in the first half of 2011.