After being panned for having cramped keyboards and “junky” hardware, netbooks evolved over the past month to include bigger screens, better graphics and larger keyboards. Netbooks will now be able to play full high-definition movies with Lenovo’s new IdeaPad S12 netbook. Asustek Computer this month introduced the Eee PC T91, a netbook with a touch screen. Jumping outside Windows, Acer announced plans to put Google’s Android on its netbooks, which should provide an Internet-savvy computing experience.

Also see: The Coolest (and Craziest) Tech Gear and Trends From Computex 2009

Lenovo’s great graphics game

One of the knocks against netbooks was poor graphics capabilities, but Lenovo has addressed that concern with its newly announced netbook. The IdeaPad S12 netbook has a 12-inch screen that can play full high-resolution movies, thanks to a powerful chip with an Nvidia graphics processor under the hood. The processor is part of an Nvidia chip package called the Ion platform, which couples the GeForce 9400 graphics core with Intel’s Atom netbook processor.

“For the first time … users will be able to enjoy brilliant 1080p high-definition video with silky smooth playback,” a Lenovo representative said. Strangely enough, Lenovo doesn’t offer an optical drive, such as Blu-ray, with the netbook. But users can buy an external Blu-ray drive or download high-definition content from the Internet.

The Computex Taipei 2009 electronics show ended Saturday after a week-long display of new gadgets, including netbooks, ultra thin laptops made with new Intel chips and several surprises surrounding Google’s Android mobile phone operating system.

The show’s final numbers were down nearly across the board from last year, but not by much considering the global recession and fears surrounding the H1N1 swine flu.

An estimated 100,000 people visited Computex Taipei 2009 from around the world, down slightly from 106,517 last year, according to figures from the Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA). The totals include 32,178 international buyers, down from 34,685 last year and 1,712 exhibitors, down compared to 1,750. The only figure that improved was the amount of booths rented, which rose to 4,498 this year, from around 4,000 last year.

The 2008 comparison figures were taken from last year’s closing press release from Computex, important to note because show organizers did not offer the figures on the 2009 press release, instead saying most of the 2009 numbers were up between 1 percent and 5 percent over last year. A TAITRA official was unable to immediately explain the discrepancy in the figures.

Chinese companies at Computex’s first ever China pavilion complained deal-making was slower than they had expected.

Chinese network equipment maker Shenzhen Yichen Technology Development found 30 percent to 40 percent more buyers at the show last year compared to this year, a representative manning the company’s booth said on the last day of Computex.

The representative blamed the economic downturn for what he said was a smaller turnout at the exhibition than last year.

The aisles of Chinese company booths were empty compared to other areas of the exhibition.

This was the first year Chinese companies were officially welcomed at Computex, though JCG was one of a group that attended last year by registering as Hong Kong-based companies. Political differences between Taiwan and China have kept the presence of Chinese firms to a minimum in the past, but growing bonds between people in both places has turned out to be a boon for business.

Over 130 Chinese companies had booths this year, according to TAITRA.

One first-time exhibitor, southern Chinese laptop vendor and designer Guangzhou Darling Industrial, also perceived a low turnout. The company did not secure the four to five business partners it expected to find, said a representative at the company’s booth.

Echoing comments by other industry experts, an ARM Holdings plc executive said Thursday that “more work” is needed to make Google Inc.’s Android operating system work well on ARM-based netbooks.

“I do think that there is more work that can and will be done to bring the things we love about Android into form factors [such as netbooks]“, Kerry McGuire, director of strategic alliances at ARM, told Computerworld. Android, she acknowledged, is still optimized for smartphones.

Netbooks running the Android platform on an ARM-based chip platform, recently dubbed smartbooks, are widely expected to pose a major challenge to netbooks running Windows on Intel Corp.’s Atom chips.

Linux-based smartbooks are expected to turn on instantly, and have longer battery life and better wireless connectivity than today’s netbooks. ARM chief executive Warren East predicted at the Computex trade show earlier this week that ARM smartbooks would grab 20% of the market next year.

While Android has the biggest-name backer among Linux distributions potentially running on ARM, it still needs “a lot of work,” Rishi Mathew, director of RealPlayer for Mobile Devices at Real Inc. said last week before Computex. “If you look at the [latest] Cupcake release of Android, it’s very targeted at smartphones, not a netbook form factor.”

Mathew cited the inability of Android to let users run multiple applications at a time, as well as the lack of drivers for plugged-in devices.

Philip Solis, an analyst with ABI Research Inc., said the Android user interface is based on a fixed number of pixels, which while perfect for a smartphone screen, remains awkward on larger ones.

While Acer Inc. announced plans at Computex to try to be the first out with an Android netbook in Q3, the first model will, surprisingly, be using an Atom processor.

Acer said it relied on a Taiwanese company, Insyde Software, to port the open-source Android over to Atom.

Could more netbook makers follow Acer and defect from ARM to Intel? “I absolutely don’t think so,” said McGuire. She said this does “not raise any concerns on the ARM side.”

Indeed, the ARM platform has its eggs in more than just the Android basket, she said. Besides Ubuntu Linux, Microsoft’s Windows Embedded CE already runs well on small devices similar to smartbooks such as media players or digital photo frames that in many cases already use an ARM chip.

“There’s no reason you couldn’t take CE into a netbook,” she said. “It would not be a stretch.”

Even Moblin, the version of Linux for Atom netbooks originally developed by Intel, could be easily ported to ARM - it was originally created for an ARM chip, McGuire said.

“If you look at the original Moblin source code, that was based on the Maemo operating system that runs on Nokia’s ARM-based N810 tablet PC,” McGuire said.