According to Digitimes, Asus is working on a new series of Atom-powered notebooks which will go under the N-series moniker and it won't be part of the Eee PC range of netbooks.

Although the N-series is set to be a sub-notebook with a 10.2-inch display, it's rumored that it will run Windows Vista rather than XP and it's possible that Asus will be putting some different hardware in the N-series; but without any specific details, it's hard to say what Asus is up to.

The price range of the N-series is meant to range from about US$479 to $639 and it said that there will be models with 320GB hard drives. Apart from this, there don't seem to be a lot of details, but we'd be as bold as to speculate that Asus wants to build something more powerful and might have gone for a different chipset solution, and possibly even for a dual-core Atom.

Time will tell what Asus is up to, but if they stick with the current platform, we can't see a huge demand for these machines at those kind of prices, despite the small size and presumably light weight, as most people who need an ultra portable still want the power of a decent notebook and not from a netbook type device.

More here