Pioneer DreamBook Coming Soon [12-inch Notebook Offers Atom Processor, ION Graphics, 3G, Ubuntu]

We all know that the 10-inch netbook market is flooded with hundreds of (almost) identical computers, but we could be seeing the 12-inch netbook market becoming the next hotspot. MSI just released a 12-inch netbook and now Pioneer is following suit.

Pioneer might be better known for their HDTVs but now their venturing into the computer market with their “DreamBook Lite”. It will ship with either the N450 or N470 processors, which will be clocked at either 1.66 or 1.83GHz. The netbook will ship with a maximum of 2GB DDR2 RAM.

The display will be a 12.1-inch model with a resolution of 1366×768. Providing graphics for that display will be NVIDIA’s Ion2 GT218 graphics chip, providing 512MB of VRAM. No word on what hard drive sizes are going to be used, but the DreamBook Lite will use 2.5-inch hard drives. Although it only has a 4-cell battery, Pioneer promises a whopping 10 hours of battery life.

You can put those ION graphics to use with an HDMI-output. Further connectivity includes Bluetooth and a SIM slot for a 3G connection. It’ll also be offering a 1.3-megapixel webcam.

Interestingly enough, Pioneer is shipping the DreamBook Lite with either Windows 7 or Ubuntu 9.10, which is great for the open-source movement. A lot of netbook manufacturers have said publicly that although Linux-based operating sytems may be better for netbooks, they’re afraid about poor sales if they put a non-Windows operating system on a low-price product.

At any rate, it’s coming from Pioneer’s Australia branch, so no word if it’ll come to the rest of the world. Nothing on a release date yet, but the word is that the MSRP will be $400.