Dospara has released their Prime Note Cartina UM 8.9-inch netbook in Japan this week. The thing is powered by a 1.6GHz Atom N270 CPU and possesses 1GB of DDR2 RAM. The Prima Note Cartina has a 120GB hard drive, a 1,024 x 600 panel, 802.11b/g WiFi anda battery designed to last two hours. The netbook comes with a variant of Linux pre-installed. For you folks visiting Japan in the near future, you can grab one for ¥39,980 or $413 American Dollars.

Dell has released a red version of their popular Inspiron Mini 9 for the Japanese market. The red netbook will finally be released today in Japan, after being rumored to exist since May. Dell Japan has also announced the Inspiron Mini 9 Platinum Package, which features a 32GB SSD for ¥54,980 or about $565.The company offers no word when or if the Red Mini will be coming to America.

ARM has teamed with Canonical to bring along Ubuntu support to netbooks. The two firms have collaborated to "bring the full Ubuntu Desktop operating system to the ARMv7 processor architecture (targeting the Cortex-A8 and Cortex -A9 in particular) to address demand from device manufacturers." The companies have asserted that this move is an attempt to outfit netbooks with ARM. The fruits of this collaboration will not begin to show up in computers until April of 2009, however.Click here for more information.

MacMall is selling the previous-gen MacBook Air for $1150 after a $100 mail-in rebate. The unit will ship for free. To make the deal even sweeter, the retailer will throw in Parallels for free as well. The deal is for brand new laptops, and not refurbished units. Head on over to MacMall to check it out.

Dell is finally set to release the Inspiron Mini 12 in North America. The company has begun taking orders for the 12-inch netbook. The base price of $549 will net you a unit featuring a 1.33GHz Atom processor, 1GB of memory, 40GB hard drive and a standard 3 cell battery. If you cough up $758, you’ll get the top end machine. This model comes equipped with a 1.66GHz Atom processor, 80GB hard drive and a 6 cell battery. All versions ship with Windows Vista Home. The units will ship out to American consumers in December.