Pink Acer Aspire One anyone? coming soon…

Acer is planning to launch a low-power and low-cost 1-liter nettop at the beginning of 2009, according to sources at OEM providers.

Since Acer expects Aspire one netbook shipments to surpass its goal of 12-13 million units in 2009, to prevent the nettop from impacting the company’s Atom processor supply, Acer is considering using processors from VIA Technologies or AMD, but will still leave the Intel Atom as a possible option.

Acer also has three manufacturers in mind to make the nettop: Quanta Computer, Wistron and Micro-Star International (MSI). The company is expected to reach a decision in December.

Acer’s nettop will be targeting both enterprise and consumer markets and be able to connect to a TV and LCD monitor.

Source www.digitimes.com

Acer shipped about 2.4 million units of their Aspire One netbook in the third quarter, with a total of 5-6 million Acer netbooks sold in 2008. If their forecast for next year is correct, the global market for netbooks would expand to up to 35 million units, with the Taiwanese manufacturer hoping to grab anything from 40-50% of the pie.

It remains to be seen how this will contribute to the bottom line and image of Acer on a global scale, but for the time being the company seems to be financially healthy with $12.8 billion in revenues so far this year which would represent a 31% increase from 2007.

 DIY Touch screen kit for the Acer Aspire One and eee PC on eBay $96, postage $25 to UK.

TouchKit Features

• 4-Wire Analog Resistive Screen
• Touch Screen Response Time <10ms
• High Transmittance >85%
• 25 Points Linearity Position with Edge Compensation
• 3 Additional USB2.0 Ports for Future Modification Plans
• Supports Windows, Mac and Linux Drivers
• Supports 11 Languages for Windows

Acer will be launching the new A150 with a 6 cell battery (rated for 6hours use) and comes in black.

The Aspire One A150 has three USB 2.0 ports, VGA output, audio in/out and dual memory card readers. It also has WiFi a/b/g and wired ethernet, and weighs 1.26kg with the new 6 cell battery.

The expected price at launch will be €399 ($498)

Picture source: unten44

The rest of the specification is the same as the other A150 models; a 1.6GHz Intel Atom N270 CPU, 1GB of RAM and 160GB hard-drive. 

Existing Aspire One users can by the 6 cell battery now from Amazon for £50.
Extended Battery for ACER Aspire One White ZG5 UM08A73 6600mAh

ThinkFree, a company that specializes in “next-gen” office productivity solutions, announced Tuesday that it has launched its ThinkFree Netbook solution, which will deliver word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation applications for Netbooks running Intel’s Atom chipsets, like the Asus Eee PC or the Acer Aspire One.

ThinkFree’s Netbook Edition is available for Windows XP, Vista, Linux, and Mac OS X and will work fine on 800×480 and 1,024×600 displays. A free trial copy of the software can be downloaded now on the company’s site.

Jacky’s Electronics, the UAE’s number one multi-brand electronics retailer, has given away 33 Acer Aspire One Netbooks during the first day of Gitex Shopper and Consumer Electronics Show 2008.

The only retailer present in all three halls of Airport Expo Dubai, Jacky’s Electronics’ shoppers will take home one of three Acer Aspire One Netbooks every hour in the remaining days of Gitex Shopper. Additionally, 11 Acer Ferrari notebooks will be given away to lucky customers across all Jacky’s Electronic’s outlets until 24 October 2008.

Further reading here

Netbook sales in EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) have literally exploded in the third quarter of 2008, making Acer the top ranking PC vendor for the first time ever, while propelling Asus up the ladder into fourth place. IDC figures show that growth in notebooks overall has been strong, but the take-up of netbooks has been staggering.

According to IDC, sales of netbooks (mini-notebooks) were largely responsible for Acer’s breath-taking rise to top spot, which saw the Taiwanese vendor almost double its number of units shipped compared to 3Q07. While sales of its desktop and traditional notbook products were strong, IDC pointed to Acer’s massive push of Aspire One netbook as contributing to its soaring volume.

Likewise, the phenomenal success of Asus Eee PC range, was singled out as the catalyst driving the vendor, which like Acer is based in Taiwan, into the ranks of elite players in the PC space. Asus grew its units by a massive 156% compared to Q307, shipping more than 2 million units for the quarter.

Source: www.itwire.com

Have a unquie Acer Aspire One, LapJacks provides pre-made or custom made artwork that just sticks on to the laptop casing to perfect size, they also do covers for mobiles, Playstation 3 and IPODs.

T-Mobile Germany have announced a deal which will see them selling a heavily-subsidized Acer Aspire One netbook along with 3G WWAN data access.  The setup, which will be internal an HSDPA modem, is similar to that recently announced by Vodafone in the UK, who have an exclusive European deal with Dell to offer 3G versions of the Inspiron Mini 9 netbook..

T-Mobile Germany will be selling the Aspire One for just one Euro ($1.43), as long as users agree to a two-year data contract at €35 per month ($50).  That works out to €841 over the two years, or $1200, which is more than the Vodafone/Dell deal; however there’s no word on what the data limit is.  Vodafone’s offer has a rather meagre 1GB cap.

Also unclear is which version of the Aspire One is on offer, the hard-drive or SSD based netbook.  Presumably Vodafone will be bundling the cheapest, which suggests the Linux OS and 8GB of SSD storage.

Thanks to slashgear for the info.