The date has been confirmed: you'll be able to get your hands on the all-new Atom N450 line of netbooks from ASUS, Acer, Lenovo and MSI on January 11th, 2009. The new Atom netbook CPU was going to be here in December, but manufacturers have been holding off at Intel's request.
However, in an effort to not overshoot consumer demand, most vendors will only stock 'conservative' numbers of the new machines. These netbooks will be coming on a wider variety of operating systems than in the past – Moblin, Windows 7, and Windows XP have been mentioned, and everyone is still holding his breath for the Google Chrome OS. Word has it that if you buy a Moblin or XP netbook in January, you can upgrade to Chrome for free by the March release of the Intel Atom N470.
Via I4U.