I have seen so many nettops lately that I am starting to think they've become just as popular as netbooks were at the beginning of the year! I mean, most of them have the same form factor, feature kind of the same specifications and are usually being sold at the same price. I've seen Ion nettops, simple nettops, nettops with DVD burners, nettops without DVD burners and a lot of different and yet the same configurations.

Meet the Onkyo P305A3 nettop, a device that the maker (you've probably heard about it from a few of our previous articles) hopes to catch the user's glimpse with a DVD burner and a bit of NVIDIA Ion sprinkled on top. Sure, we've seen nettops with DVD burners before but what this device has best is its shape. Most nettops I've seen with optical drives didn't look all that great, but the Onkyo P305A3, despite its uninspired name, is quite the looker, with a nice choice of colors and cool curvy appearance.

As far as specification go, the gadget has an Intel Atom 230 processor running at 1.6 GHz while NVIDIA's Ion technology handles the graphics. And we all know what the Ion chipset can do, right? The side mounted optical drive is detachable so you can go for a slimmer figure if you think your nettop PC is too chubby for your liking. There are also 2GB of RAM, a hard disk drive (HDD) that sizes 160GB, as well as four USB 2.0 ports.

You'll be getting eSATA and HDMI ports, the optional WiFi link and Windows 7 Home Premium (how else, with Windows 7 getting ready for launch in two days?). Ok, I have to admit the device is quite interesting, however there is something that bothers me a lot: Atom 230? I mean, isn't that a little too low? Why not a dual core Atom 330 at least? Anyway, the gadget will be sold starting with March 11 (umm... March?) and will cost 992 USD (that's 89.800 yen) without an HD 21.5-inch LCD or 771USD (69.800 yen).


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