Jolicloud is a great operating system for netbooks. It's easy to install, simple to use and offers great flexibility. One of the great thing about Jolicloud is that the development team keeps improving the software to take advantage of the latest hardware.

Intel's new Pine Trail chipset uses their Pineview processor and integrates the graphic controller to the CPU's die. As well as reducing the number of chips in the chipset from three to two, this delivers superior battery life. This is seen in the latest N450 based netbooks, over last years N280 based hardware. 

Joilicloud's YouTube channel shows off a new pre-beta of the software running HD video. That's right - full 1080p on a netbook.

This is a significant breakthrough - not because of the video playback (as cool as that is) but because it puts paid to some of the criticisms made about netbooks not being powerful enough for real work. There are plenty of not ebooks on the market that cost more than a netbook an can't manage HD playback.

By Anthony Caruana