Netbooks are definitely a hot topic as of 2008, and the interest for these small and relatively affordable designs is not melting down in 2009. Our sources close to Intel have told us that Microsoft is the one that keeps the manufacturers up to 10 inches, not Intel.

The story is rather simple, Microsoft is selling its cheap Windows XP netbook license to everyone that has up to 10 inch display based netbooks and promises that it won’t use more than 1GB of memory. In theory, if you want to launch 15-inch Atom based netbook, you will have to pay more for your XP license and this would get your cost up as well.

Since Dell is already selling Atom in 12-inch netbook we are quite sure that if you are big enough, there will be some exceptions.