Posted 11/16/09 at 07:35:58 PM by Ryan Whitwam

AT&T has just started selling a handsome pair of 3G equipped netbooks running Windows 7 Starter. While there’s certainly nothing wrong with the Acer Aspire One, or the Samsung Go, the value proposition here isn’t the best.

Each unit will set you back $199 after a mail-in rebate and new two-year agreement. Factor in the cost of data, and things start looking bleak. AT&T offers a $35 per month plan with a laughable 200MB monthly data cap. The more expensive $60 per month plan has a more reasonable 5GB monthly limit. It works out to a total cost of $1,639 over the two years. Now consider that it’s only running Windows 7 Starter, meaning you’re missing some of the neat Windows 7 features like Media Center and well… changing the wallpaper.

The value may not be great, but if you need a netbook with built in 3G, these are fine machines. Alternatively, you could just opt for a USB data card and cheap netbook from elsewhere. Better yet, wait for Pine Trail based netbooks to make the scene. Is anyone planning on swinging by the local AT&T store to investigate further? Maybe take that Windows Anytime Upgrade for a spin?

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Posted 11/10/09 at 06:13:40 PM by Pulkit Chandna

Best Buy today announced the launch of its “holiday computing selection” spanning nine different brands. Although the lineup is said to include over 30 notebooks, six netbooks, 17 desktops and four all-in-ones from some of the top brands, the retailer seems to have reserved the spotlight for a $249 Acer laptop. After all, it is Best Buy’s “lowest-advertised-price laptop” ever.

The retailer is hoping that the $249 will appeal to “value-conscious consumers.” But don’t expect the laptop to set any new performance benchmarks, for it features an insipid cocktail containing an Intel Celeron 900 CPU, 2GB memory, and a 160GB hard drive.  The $249 Acer notebook will go on sale tomorrow, along with the rest of Best Buy’s holiday computing lineup.

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Posted 11/09/09 at 05:52:26 PM by Michael Brown

The Acer H235H is typical of this class of displays: It’s based on a six-bit TN panel that uses frame-rate control to augment its color depth. The screen delivers 23 inches of viewable area at a native resolution of 1920x1080.

As with nearly all the monitors we tested, we found it necessary to make significant adjustments to the display’s brightness and contrast settings to make the monitor look its best with our DisplayMate benchmark software. But the five touch-sensitive buttons in the Acer’s glossy black bezel and the obtuse icons in its onscreen display make this process extremely frustrating; the onscreen icons don’t line up precisely with the physical buttons and it takes too many button presses to drill down into each menu choice. It takes five button presses, for instance, to make a single brightness adjustment.

Continue reading this review after the jump.

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Posted 11/05/09 at 07:59:31 AM by Paul Lilly

While the mobile world drools over Droid, there's another smartphone that has a shot of stealing a few headlines. We're talking about Acer's upcoming Liquid A1, which is expected to ship in Europe within the next few weeks.

The Liquid A1 is the first Android-based smartphone to be built around Qualcomm's Snapdragon chipset. And even though the CPU has been downclocked to 768MHz, that's a lot more pep than most Android phones are boasting.

Oddly, Acer has decided not to step up to Android 2.0 (Eclair), and the Liquid A1 will instead run on Android 1.6 (Donut). That puts it a generation behind the Droid and other upcoming Android 2.0 smartphones, although this could change by the time the A1 ships. We also wouldn't rule out a software update after the fact, although Acer has spent some time tweaking "a new user interface with easy access to entertainment and web bookmarks."

No word yet on price or when this one's expected to land in the U.S.

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Posted 11/03/09 at 08:00:54 AM by Paul Lilly

Acer's been talking up a storm about its future notebook plans and how it's going to take on the likes of Dell and HP, and it begins with the release of the Aspire AS8940G-6865 with an 18.4-inch display and Intel Core i7 720QM processor.

Driving the large screen display is an Nvidia GeForce GTS 250M graphics card with 1GB of dedicated memory. Other specs include 4GB of DDR3-1066 memory, a 500GB hard drive, 4X Blu-ray drive, multi-card reader, 802.11a/b/g/Draft-N WiFi, five USB 2.0 ports, HDMI and eSATA ports, and Windows Home Premium 64-bit.

"This new Aspire notebook offers multimedia enthusiasts the ultimate in mobile entertainment -- cinematic quality sound and visuals, an industry-leading feature-set, and the performance to handle demanding digital media," said Preeta Anil, Product Manager, Notebooks for Acer America. "The addition of Intel's new Core i7 processor further boosts the power and performance of the Aspire AS58940G for games, movies, videos, and more."

Acer says its new notebook will be available for purchase in time for the holiday season for $1,350. Not a bad price for the hardware.

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Posted 10/30/09 at 09:46:29 AM by Paul Lilly

We've been talking a lot about Acer lately, and that's because Acer has been doing a lot of talking of its own. The OEM's been pounding its chest like Kevin Garnett after an 'and-one' and talking smack to Dell, HP, and anyone else who stands in its way. And now the OEM is saying it's fully prepared to take on HP in a bit of a pricing war, which comes just a day after Acer said it feels confident it will ship 40 million notebooks in 2010.

According to news and rumor site DigiTimes, HP has already kicked off some pretty fierce price competition in a few designated markets, which includes sub-$300 models in the U.S. Acer's ever talkative chairman JT Wang said his company will not only follow suit, but plans to one-up HP by aggressively marketing its netbook and ultra-thin segments, both of which are areas HP is a little weaker in.

Beyond 2010, Wang said the global netbook market is on track to reach 350 million units, and we're a bit surprised Acer didn't say it plans to capture 349 million of them.

Let the price wars begin.

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Posted 10/29/09 at 08:25:41 PM by Ryan Whitwam

PC vender Acer is on quite the roll as of late. They’ve finally become number two in worldwide notebook sales, beating out Dell. Now they expect to be able to ship 40 million notebooks in 2010, and take the number one spot from market leader HP.

Earlier this year Acer was predicting only 33 to 37 million units shipped, but better than expected performance in the second half of the year caused them to raise expectations. One of Acer’s major problems is the ongoing shortage of hardware, including optical drives, LCD panels, hard drives, and graphics chips. Acer Chairman, JT Wang, indicated that even with possible shortages the company would likely reach its goal.

Acer has become a major player in the last few years. Their notebook shipments have more than doubled, mostly due to the success of netbooks marketed heavily to consumers. They plan to continue on this path into next year.

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Posted 10/27/09 at 09:12:10 PM by Jason Barry

The mobile phone market boasts worldwide sales growth of 29 percent year-over-year to reach 180 million units. Smartphones are expected to account for 37 percent of global handset sales by 2012 with forecasted revenue of $191 million by 2012. So, what does that have to do with PC’s?

Analysts think that PC makers want a piece of that huge growth action. The growth percentages mentioned above are already far above that of worldwide PC sales numbers and outside of Apple, few PC makers have been able to cash in. Although, “PC vendors will find it difficult to simply use existing supply chains and channels to expand their presence in the smart phone market,” according to Roberta Cozza, principal analyst at Gartner.

Despite the difficulties, it is inevitable that more PC manufacturers will dip their toes into the success of mobile markets even though it is a very different ocean. Acer, Asus and Toshiba have all announced smartphone launches and this trend is expected to continue.

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