2008 has been the year for netbook madness. Ryan ordered an Acer, my friend John got an Eee PC and now HP is coming out with a new netbook that appears to be quite the offering. The Mini 1000 features a 1.6Ghz Intel Atom CPU, either a 8.9-inch or 10.2-inch display and up to 2GB of RAM. SSD is available in a 16GB drive or you can get a 60GB HDD for more storage. You can, of course, expand your storage via a USB memory stick as well.

As far as the OS goes, you can choose an Ubuntu Linux install that HP is calling the “MIE OS.” MIE stands for Mobile Internet Experience and essentially, it presents you with a bunch of commonly used apps and tasks that looks like an HP TouchSmart PC. Not bad. XP is also available for those looking to go a little more mainstream. The XP version of the Mini 1000 is available today for $399 with 512MB of RAM and an 8GB SSD with the 8.9-inch screen. For $50 more, you can score the 10.2-inch version. Look for the Linux version in early 2009.

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You may recall from our Father’s Day guide that I recommended Firefox 3 for a download. After all, it’s free, safe and full of computational power. Now that it’s June 17th, it’s time to help set a Guinness World Record for most software downloads in a 24-hour period.

Head on over to SpreadFirefox.com and pledge to to download FF3 when it’s released. Speaking of which, it’s June 17th and I have yet to see the official release of Firefox 3 become available. What gives, Mozilla? Delaying the inevitable?

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Update: Stix points out that FF3 will be released at 10AM PST. Thanks!

Update #2: Hack a Day tells the world how you can get FF3 early!

If you keep track of Gearfuse, you would have an impression of the Mitsubishi D800iDS double internal screen phone we premiered the spypic and reported. One of the benefits of having 2 screens is actually for browsing webpages. The D800iDS, just like most other 3G phones from NTT DoCoMo, can install this JAVA full HTML Jig browser, and it works exceptionally well. First, you would have a map of the whole webpage on the upper screen, showing you where you are at, and you can zoom in and pan around using the subdisplay below. Then, when you need to type anything, simply call up the keyboard and the on screen T9 buttons will be activated (Photo after the jump), no stupid stylus needed. Not too shabby eh.

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