Hands-on with Acer's new netbook




Acer makes us mobile with diddly laptops and big batteres
Acer kicked off its briefing yesterday with a smattering of quite impressive stats and optimistic predictions for the rest of 2009. According to Professional Division Manager Bobby Watkins, Acer shifted enough units in 2008 to sit currently as the world’s number three total PC vendor, and the number two netbook vendor. Watkins suggested that sales have been so promising of late that Acer sees “the opportunity to take over HP as number one in 2009” as being a very real prospect. And hey, who are we to argue with bar graphs?

Being top of the notebook and netbook charts is clearly paramount to Acer, who’s moving towards a business model that’ll put it as the world’s numero uno “Mobile Solution Company”; a move no doubt aided by the upcoming Acer Smartphones.


So with a new business plan in mind, what’s new? Essentially, three new laptops under the name ‘Timeline’, and an updated Aspire One – the 751. The big news is a quite staggering battery life that encroaching the 9 hour mark. Indeed, we fiddled with one of the Timelines, and the battery status gleefully read “77%, 9.5 hours remaining”. Impressive stuff. The catch with the 751 netbook is that you'll have to opt for a larger '6 cell' battery pack to acheive your 8 hours of mobile life (it'll do 5 hours with the standard battery), but that seems like a small compromise to have such longevity from such a device. It and aforementioned Timelines will be out at the end of May priced from £349.

Acer also showed early pictures of an all-in-one machine, tentatively (and somewhat unoriginally) named AIO. It's set to come out "not a day before Windows 7", in order to be shipped with the upcoming Microsoft software. Until then, you'll have to make do with the tiny Revo nettop.

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