Friday night, before the hard working people of Nvidia finished their jobs and went off for the weekend, we were lucky to meet some old chaps who were good enough to show us their latest netbooks with ION inside of Atom-based machines.

Some of them will be announced very shortly and some of them such as Lenovo have already been announced, but they won’t be available until Microsoft officially launches Windows 7. Samsung's ION netbook one is also out.

Since the Atom platform works just fine for web browsing and typing, we wanted to test HD 1080p playback, something that an Atom-powered system with 945GCE cannot do.

Once you get ION inside, HD playback becomes reality and the average CPU load drops to 10 to 20 percent and the HD experience is great. With ION you can also play some basic games and weather Intel will like it or not ION can give you a much better experience, but at the same time we suspect that ION will reduce battery life, but we would not be able to say by how much.