Acer, Asus hold off on new netbooks until 2010

It looks like two of the biggest netbook manufacturers, Asus and Acer, are going to shift focus a bit in the latter half of this year according to DigiTimes. The site quotes “industry sources” who claim that, since Intel has pushed back its Pine Trail platform to early 2010, both companies will suspend development of new netbooks until then. In the meantime, the Taiwanese firms will instead concentrate on their respective CULV-based lineups.

This does not extend to models already announced; therefore Asus will still be launching its Eee PC T101 touch screen netbook and possibly an Android-based netbook before the end of October. For its part, Acer will postpone the launch of its dual-boot Android / XP machine and let its current 10-inch Aspire One serve the netbook market for the remaining of the year.

Although working Pine Trail netbooks were shown off during Computex in June, recent reports suggest Intel has indeed delayed the platform's launch. Intended to succeed the ever-present N270 + 945GSE combination, Pine Trail will bring about the Atom’s N450 successor, featuring a system-on-a-chip design with CPU, memory controller, and graphics on a single die, while a separate Tiger Point chipset will handle I/O operations.