Yesterday I hiked eight miles with my 11-inch MacBook Air in my bag. Didn’t even notice it was there. These MacBook Air owners sound sycophantic, but discount this praise at your own peril—especially if you’re a laptop manufacturer. More »
Acer: netbooks will not be phased out, Sandy Bridge tablets not coming any time soon originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 19 Jan 2011 14:59:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Add Acer to the growing list of companies with new tablets in the pipeline. The Taiwanese computer manufacturer has announced plans to release both a 7-inch and a 10-inch tablet in 2011.
The new tablets are intended to gradually replace the company’s line of netbook computers, said Acer’s Taiwan sales manager Lu Bing-Hsian. “That’s the direction of the market,” Lu told Computerworld. The company will still continue to produce netbooks, but will begin to phase out its range of netbook models while producing the new line of tablets.
The tablets will run the Android OS (version unspecified) on Intel’s new line of quad-core Sandy Bridge processors. With the move to Sandy Bridge, Acer is aiming to outmuscle the numerous Nvidia Tegra 2–powered smartphones and tablets announced earlier this month at CES.
Acer’s Lu declined to state price points and specific release dates for the new tablet offerings.
It’s a huge shift for Acer, a company which has sold tens of millions of netbooks over the past decade and has relied on the ultra-portable netbook as the key component of its business strategy to date. The announcement comes on the heels of a recent Gartner report on worldwide PC sales that shows Acer’s 2010 growth down 1.9 percent from 2009.
“Media tablets undoubtedly intensified the competition in the consumer market,” said Gartner analyst Mikako Kakagawa in the report. “These devices do not replace primary PCs, but they are viewed as good enough devices for these who want to have a second and third connected device for content-consumption usage. Mini-notebook shipments were hit the most by the success of media tablets.”
Also, this isn’t the first tablet we’ve seen from Acer. After sales of the company’s 11.2-inch convertible tablet-notebook combo fizzled on arrival in May 2010, Acer discontinued it after only a few short months.
Acer’s tablet offerings also appear to completely reverse the company’s position as of only a year ago, when Acer’s Taiwan president Scott Lin said the company had no plans to pursue a tablet option, and that the iPad would be unlikely to impact the netbook market.
“Apple has built [its] business out of carving its own niche,” Lin told the DigiTimes last February, “which means that while Apple could see success with devices like the iPad, other players are unlikely to be able to replicate its result simply by copying.”
Tablet sales overall have been robust, with industry analysts estimating Apple’s 2010 holiday iPad sales somewhere in the range of 5 to 7 million units, and Samsung’s Galaxy Tab hitting the 1 million sales mark in early December. The market is expected to continue to grow, as many of the dozens of tablets we saw at CES make their way to shelves this year.
See Also:
A MacBook modified into a tablet: Jim Merithew/Wired.com
Samsung has outed three new netbooks, all refreshes to previous models. On offer is the 10.1-inch NC210, which boasts a dual-core, Intel Atom N550 CPU with up to 3GB of DDR3 SDRAM, a 250GB hard drive, 802.11 b/g/n WiFi, LAN, and Bluetooth 3.0. It’s also got a VGA port, three USB 2.0 ports, a 4-in-1 card reader, and a 6-cell battery. The company has also trotted out the NC110, which boasts a 1.5GHz, dual-core Atom N570 but seems to be identical to the NC210 other than that.
In other, rather less exciting Samsung netbook news, the company also rolled out the NF310, and the NS310, the former one being an LTE-packing 10.1-incher, while the NS310 is yet another netbook of the same size with a metallic chassis. There aren’t full specs, pricing or availability yet for any of these models, but you can hit up the source links for more photos.
Samsung refreshes netbooks with dual-core NC210, among others originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 13 Jan 2011 11:17:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Lenovo has just made it rain laptops over here (literally — we got hit in the head a few times) with the addition of 18 new IdeaPads to its lineup. First up, the S Series netbooks include the IdeaPad S205 and the S100. The S205 boasts up to and AMD dual-core E-350 CPU, an 11.6-inch (1366 x 768 resolution) 16:9 widescreen panel, up to 8GB of DDR3 SDRAM, and an up to 750GB HDD. It also packs Bluetooth and 802.11b/g/n WiFi, HDMI out, USB 2.0 and a 6-in-1 card reader, plus optional 3G. The smaller netbook on offer is the 10.1-inch IdeaPad S100. It has choice of processors up to a dual-core Intel Atom N570, Integrated Intel GMA 3150 graphics, up to 2GB of DDR3 memory, and an up to 320GB HDD. The S100 also boasts Bluetooth, 802.11b/g/n WiFi, USB 2.0 connectors, 2 megapixel webcam, and a 2-in-1 card reader. Both the IdeaPad S205 and S100 weigh in at about 2.2 pounds, and will be available starting in March for the base price of $329. Full press release is after the break.
Continue reading Lenovo busts out S Series netbooks just in time for CES
Lenovo busts out S Series netbooks just in time for CES originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 04 Jan 2011 00:06:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Among the many new-product announcements that have been released in the time leading up to CES, word on the web is that Dell will launch a new Latitude 2120 netbook at the Vegas convention next week. Apparently, the 2120 has specs identical to the previously available 2110, but gets double the computing power of the single core Intel Atom N470 chipset in its predecessor courtesy of a dual core N550 processor. While the upgraded processor is the big news, sources indicate the newest Latitude gets an optional Broadcom Crystal HD video accelerator, which should be a welcome addition for those students planning to watch March Madness during that 10AM lecture this spring semester. No word on price or availability, so interested parties will have to wait until the official launch for such details.
Dell to launch Latitude 2120 netbook at CES? originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 01 Jan 2011 01:34:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Google is aiming to put the “net” in netbook with Chrome OS, a lightweight operating system that focuses on web apps and online storage.
Due for release in mid-2011, the first batch of Chrome OS netbooks will come with Intel processors and Verizon data plans. They’ll download apps through a Google app store hosted on the web. Google detailed plans of Chrome OS in a press event Tuesday.
“We finally have a viable third choice for an operating system on the desktop,” said Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO.
Chrome OS is Google’s vision of the future of computers: always-connected devices that ditch the traditional hard drive and instead rely on web-coded applications and “cloud” storage. It’s yet another area where Google goes head-to-head with its biggest rival, Apple, who recently introduced a flash-based MacBook Air and a Mac App Store for downloading apps.
Here’s a quick summary of what you need to know about Chrome OS.
Google has partnered with Samsung and Acer, whose Chrome OS laptops will go on sale in mid-2011. More manufacturers will follow.
Though exact specifications for future devices are unknown, Google is handing out an unbranded pilot device running Chrome OS called the Cr-48.
The Cr-48 features a 12.1-inch screen, an Intel Atom processor, a flash memory drive, Wi-Fi, a “world-mode” 3G chip that works with international cellular networks and a built-in “jailbreaking” mode so you can hack it.
Official price tags for Chrome OS netbooks have not been revealed, but Google’s Schmidt has claimed they will be priced between $300 to $400.
The 3G plan for Chrome OS netbooks is nothing like a cellphone’s. When you buy a Chrome OS netbook, Verizon will give you 100 MB of free 3G data per month for two years. There are no overage fees.
If you regularly need more than 100 MB, there are a few long-term plans starting at $10 a month for additional data.
And if you need more data only occasionally, you can buy a day pass to get unlimited 3G access for one day. The price for the day pass has not yet been disclosed.
Keep in mind that if you’re mostly using a Chrome OS netbook at home, you can just connect to your Wi-Fi network for free.
There wasn’t even so much as a press release announcing this one, but The New York Times has confirmed with Intel that the chip maker recently formed a new business unit dubbed simply the “netbook and tablet group.” That’s apparently been tasked with fending off competition in the netbook and tablet space, and ensuring Intel remains as successful as it has been with its Atom processors — it will be led by the the current head of Intel’s embedded and communications group, Douglas L. Davis. Intel spokesman Bill Kircos further explained that “it makes sense for us to sharpen our focus on these friends of the PC, and Doug’s experience running a similar and very successful embedded division makes him the right guy to lead the group.”
Intel quietly forms netbook and tablet group to fend off competition originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 08 Dec 2010 13:01:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
It’s almost time to eat turkey and then jet out to Best Buy to be trampled by mad shoppers. Oh yes, the holiday season is just about here, which according to a few posts we’ve written in the last year means that the Chrome OS netbooks should be as well. Well, it turns out that the Google OS-powered laptops aren’t going to arrive this year, or at least not in the way we thought they would. That doesn’t mean Chrome OS isn’t going to see a bit of an unveil this year, but major manufacturers, including Acer and HP, won’t have its own Chromebooks ready before 2011. How do we know? Acer’s Jim Wong told us during the company’s global press conference that Acer will be launching its netbook based on the browser operating system during the “consumer launch” of the OS next year, while Google has its own agenda and will be doing something “in December.” We didn’t get to ask if that Acer netbook is in fact the “ZGA” netbook we’ve seen popping up in bug reports, but our guess is that it will be something quite similar.
So, what does Google have brewing? You remember the Google-branded Chrome OS netbook that we heard about? Well, according to a few of our very own sources, that’s exactly what’s going to happen. We don’t have exact timing details, but we have been told by a few that Google will launch its own Chrome-book a la the Nexus One for “friends and family.” As the operating system is still in a beta or preview form, the netbook would be aimed at the development / early adopter community. Specs-wise we don’t know all that much, but we’ve heard that it will be powered by an Intel Atom Pine Trail processor and, just as Digitimes reported, that 75,000 units are being manufactured by Taiwan ODM Inventec. We should mention that the aforementioned Acer “ZGA” was said to be used internally as a “dogfood device” at Google, but we believe this Google-branded device to be entirely different. Inventec, Intel, and Google wouldn’t comment on the hardware rumor, but Google did tell us that it would “have more details to share later this year.” By our count, that leaves ’em with just about 37 days to spill the beans!
Note: The picture above is just our creative interpretation of what a Chromebook may look like — don’t come crying to us when the actual device looks a lot prettier.
Chrome OS consumer launch pushed to 2011, Google-branded Chromebook could still arrive this year originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 24 Nov 2010 12:10:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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