The ongoing news about larger than 10-inch netbooks is that if you dare to challenge the word of Mooly Eden or David (Dadi) Perlmutter, two top EVPs of VPs of Intel’s mobile group, and make a netbook with a screen over 10 inches, you will be denied your market development fund money.

This is the money Intel gives you to make the making of money on selling their product a bit easier, and despite being legal it involves a lot of controversy. Intel is a big monopolist with AMD, the kid throwing toys around and sometimes getting on its nerves, but in reality Intel controls the market.

Atom in larger than 10-inch netbooks makes the machines really usable and will bring Intel average selling prices further down. This means less money for Deutsche bank, Morgan Stanley and the rest of the “smart investors”, who could put pressure on Intel not to let this happen.

At CES we saw two larger than 10-inch machines: one 12 incher from Asus, and MSI's Wind meets Air 13.3-inch X320. MSI will definitely have a lot explaining to do to Apple, due to some similarity in design, but this is another story altogether.

It will be interesting watching Intel trying to prevent bigger than 10 inch notebooks, as Intel told us that this should not be possible as Atom is not fast enough for bigger than 10-inch screens. The market, and Intel’s partners, beg to differ.