Onkyo Nettop with Detachable DVD Drive
Onkyo Japan have announced an NVidia ION powered nettop of their own in the P3 series which has an interesting design and also has a separate slot-in part which includes a DVD drive. The Onkyo P305A3 sports a single core Atom 230 processor, GeForce 9400M G (ION) chipset, 2GB RAM and 160GB HDD. It has these ports: 4x USB, eSATA, HDMI, 5-in-1 card reader, Wi-Fi. Runs Windows 7 Home Premium. Available with a very nice looking wireless keyboard, and mouse.
For the nettop only model, the price is expected to be at a whopping 69,800 yen ($771) which is 2x the price of all the other ION nettops in the market in Japan.Onkyo’s offering is particularly curvy and pleasing. The Onkyo P305A3 may not have a catchy name but it does offer an Intel Atom 230 1.6GHz processor paired with an NVIDIA Ion graphics chipset, while the optical drive is detachable from the side. There’s also 2GB of RAM, a 160GB hard-drive and four USB 2.0 ports. Other connectivity includes eSATA and HDMI, together with optional WiFI, and the whole thing runs Windows 7 Home Premium.
To be fair, it’s arguably pointless to have a removable optical drive if it doesn’t result in a slimmer or lighter nettop overall, and the P305A3’s curved base means detaching the DVD burner won’t actually make it all that smaller. We’re also not impressed with the Atom 230 processor, and hope Onkyo replace it with – at the very least – the dual-core Atom 330. The nettop will go on sale in Japan on March 11th (which seems a very long way off) for 69,800 yen ($771) or with an HD 21.5-inch LCD for 89,800 ($992).