The Medion Akoya E1311 is based on AMD's Neo platform, it's powered by a 1.4GHz Sempron U210, has Radeon X1250 graphics with HDMI out, 1GB of memory and 160GB of storage. Connectivity isn't an issue with draft-n wireless and Bluetooth.

The 12-inch Wind U210 is based on AMD's Athlon Neo MV-40 at 1.6GHz, and it will be available in two SKUs. The cheaper version will ship with XP, a rather netbookish 1GB of memory and 160GB of storage, and it will cost €399.

It's powered by an Athlon Neo MV-40 CPU at 1.6GHz, has integrated Radeon X1250 graphics, 2GB of memory and 320GB. Nothing too impressive, but at €499 it's truly great value for money. We're not sure about the availability date, but we will try to find out more.

Well that is impressive graphics for a netbook. You could play WoW on it.

Considering the contestants, it was almost a foregone conclusion, but it's always good to have concrete numbers to back up our recommendations. As far as we're concerned, laptops - especially entry-level laptops - need to function as a mobile computer first and foremost. By that criterion, Intel has the clearly better mobile platform. Faster CPUs that draw less power and provide better battery life rate a lot higher in our book than barely adequate gaming performance. A 16% price increase for 25% more battery life and 25% faster general application performance is hard to beat. Using a higher capacity battery on an AMD platform could give you equivalent battery life, but then you're lugging around a heavier laptop and many high capacity batteries cost far more than $80. If you really want improved battery life, you'd be looking at an Intel platform with a high-capacity battery - or a MacBook.

However, in spite of that, AMD has revamped the platform with a dual-core CPU, the Neo L626. Of course, we're still talking about a 5-year-old K8 design, but at least it ships with a decent chipset and a nice IGP, or even Radeon HD3410 discrete graphics.