While doing a brief review of Brown Knows today, I could help noticing a little guiltily that I haven’t written a market analysis piece since 19 November. Still, even though more than three months have passed since then, I could use the same headline I used for that article today: “Mini-Note Market Taking Off”.

Yes, indeed, the trend that began with the announcements of the VIA NanoBook Reference Design and the Asus EeePC way back in early June last year is continuing to gather steam and is set to be the most significant development in the PC market in 2008.

What is exciting for us at VIA is the growing number of Mini-Notes that have been introduced using the VIA NanoBook reference design and the VIA C7-M processor, ranging from the Packard Bell EasyNote XS and MaxData Belinea s.book in Europe to the Everex CloudBook in the US and, most recently, the Sungjut TangoX Nano UMPC in Korea and the Zyrex Ubud in Indonesia.

This shows that the Mini-Note market is a truly global phenomenon and one that VIA is taking a leadership role in creating thanks to the investments we have made not just in developing the right platforms but also complete system reference designs that enable companies to quickly introduce new products into the market.

In my 19 November piece, I said I wouldn’t be surprised if the market for Mini-Notes “reached 5 million units for 2008..” Three months later, I am even more confident in my projection and believe there’s a good chance that the size of the market will turn out to be significantly larger than that.