According to Digitimes, Asus, Acer, Lenovo and MSI will launch Atom N450-based netbooks on January 11, following an agreement with Intel to hold of the launch until after January 10.

The new netbooks should feature Windows 7 Starter, XP Home Edition or Moblin Linux. There's a chance we'll see Google's Chrome OS on them a bit later on. Atom N470 models should follow in March and several smaller vendors should also launch new products soon after the big players.

However, the new Atoms will not offer a significant performance boost compared to current generation models, but at least they have a significantly smaller footprint and lower power consumption.

More here.