Sometimes it can be difficult sifting through the speculation and figuring out what's real and what's not, so we're always pleased as punch when a company bigwig spills the beans on an upcoming project. During a recent interview with Bloomberg, Jim Wong, senior corporate vice president and president of IT product business group at Acer, did just that by confirming earlier reports of an impending Chrome OS netbook.

The new Core i5 and Core i7 mobile CPUs are already finding their way into some products. Panasonic has announced that the Japanese version of the Toughbook laptops, known there as Lets Note, will be getting some speedy new Nehalem-based processors. The new rugged (and a little ugly) offerings will come in four flavors.

Most netbooks and other ultra-mobile PCs currently run on Intel’s Atom x86 chips, but according to Analytics firm ABI, they shouldn’t get too used to being on top. In a new report, ABI is claiming that ARM-based chips will overtake Intel by 2013. ARM has been pushing for the opportunity to power non-smartphone devices for some time now.

Intel earlier today announced its next-generation Atom platform, and no sooner had the press release hit the news waves, Dell followed suit by being the first to announce a refreshed Mini 10 netbook lineup sporting the newly minted Atom N450 CPU.

It looks like the elves in Intel's workshop have been working overtime this holiday season, enough so that the chip maker today officially announced its next generation Atom platform, which includes the first Intel chips to integrate graphics and a memory controller in the CPU.

News and rumor site Fudzilla claims to have had an "interesting chat with key people involved in Nvidia's Ion project," all of which sounded pretty confident about the company's next generation Ion, or Ion 2.

Intel recently announced it was fast tracking the release of its Pine Trail platform, which we expect to see sooner rather than later in 2010. We now have a little more info to share on this Atom platform replacement.

Citing un-named industry sources, news and rumor site DigiTimes reports that Acer has been working on a new netbook built around Google's upcoming Chrome OS since the middle of this year, and will launch the unit sometime in the second half of 2010.

DigiTimes also claims to have heard it straight from the horse's mouth, with Acer chairman J.T. Wang expressing confidence during an interview that his company will beat all others to the punch and bring the first Chrome-based netbook to market.

If you've seen one netbook, you've them all, minus a slight variation here and there, and that includes the internal specs. So if a company goes off the beaten path and releases something a little bit 'different,' they should be applauded, right? Decide for yourself.

Let's set the record straight. A 12.1-inch portable PC lands in netbook territory, even if it does toe the line between netbook and laptop. Going any bigger lands in that debatable gray area, so long as it still sports an Intel Atom processor or comparatively low power chip (VIA Nano, for example).