Acer Chairman, J.T. Wang is pretty sure that Q1 will be better than the Q2 and that the waiting period for some components has already increased, which is an indication that demand is indeed growing. Acer is pretty sure to ship nearly a million of the Aspire One D150 netbooks every month from now.
Looks like, their forecast about shipping 12-15 million netbooks in the year 2009 was pretty true.
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[via fudzilla]
All the three Taiwanese netbook manufacturers: ASUS, ACER and BENQ occupy nearly 55% of the total netbooks market share in China. ASUS has 30% followed by ACER at 16% and then Benq at 9%. Although, I’m not surprised to see ASUS and ACER at the top of the list, but I did not expected BENQ to be selling that well.
Although Samsung and HP are also selling their netbooks in the market, but they are not selling like hot cakes and thus have much lower market shares.
[via digitimes]
Everyday, we hear about netbook manufactures adding more and more features in their netbooks, which is now putting them in the category of low-end notebooks. According to the President of The Information Network, Intel is earning not much from the Atom chips and so is Microsoft. We all already know that the Microsoft sells XP licenses to the netbook manufactures for cheap prices.
Anyway, remember the original concept of netbook? The netbooks were supposed to be:
With the numerous addons that the netbook manufactures have started including like bigger displays; bigger keyboards and even DVD burners(!), the word cheap is now out of equation. In fact, some of the top-end netbooks cost more than the entry level notebooks.
In netbooks’ infancy stage, end-users did not see netbooks as media players and full fledge laptops. Now, they do. Why? The reason is simple: people wanted to do much more on these little devices, which the netbooks manucatures like ASUS did not expect to happen. People wanted to see HD video on their netbooks and yearned for bigger screens. This ultimately gave birth to netbooks equipped with bigger screens and huge HDDs. It also made it clear that people want to store a lot on their devices. This decreased the demand for the SSDs as it offered much less storage compared to the HDDs at the same price.
The processing power of the netbooks is now enough to let you see HD content (720p videos can be played easily on almost any netbook). It is only a matter of time that there will be a little difference between the processing power of netbooks and atleast entry level notebooks.
Only few of us had expected that the lines between netbooks and notebooks would get blurred so soon. Consumers want their netbooks to everything and the netbook manufactures are doing everything they can to make the netbook do more and more.
Conclusion: Future looks very bright for the netbook manfactures, but same cannot be said for the only notebook manufactures.
Who does not like free stuff? ASUS is giving away 4 mystery EEE PCs for free. Winning is simple. Simple visit EEE PC group in Facebook and leave a valuable feedback on the four products. To know about these four products, you will have to visit their YouTube channel, Facebook profile and Myspace page. The products will continue to appear till April 10, 2009.
Please note that this contest is open for only those who are living in the US.
[via]
Plethora of Taiwanese LCD manufactures are readying themselves for the Windows 7’s multi-touch feature. Young Fast Optoelectronics, a Taiwanese company has already started manufacturing capacitive screens for the notebooks and will soon start manufacturing for the netbooks. Resistive touch screen makers like Mildex Optical will also start production to give some competition to the capacitive screen manufactures.
Windows 7 will probably be launched later this year (or early next year) and most of the netbook manufactures will FINALLY make switch from Windows XP to Windows 7. The reason is simple: Windows 7 offers some great multi-touch features which can change the way we use our devices and it will result in bump in demand of touch panels in netbooks/UMPCs.
[via fudzilla]
OCZ has made the DIY Neutrino netbook official. This is not just another netbook. OCZ believes that the customer should be allowed to choose the memory, storage and the choice of OS that they want on their netbook. Every DIY netbook comes with:
10.1-inch screenThe user has the choice to configure their DIY netbook with upto 2GB RAM and upto 250GB HDD/SSD. I hope they make the battery also configurable as it is not much when compared to the competitors.
This is a good move by OCZ as this will allow them to get the netbooks according to the configuration they desire. The name is also apt. DIY = DO IT YOURSELF. Should not it be CIY = CONFIGURE IT YOURSELF?
Following the immense success of the original 8.9-inch Acer Aspire One, Acer’s new Aspire One AKA D150 comes with a bigger 10.1-inch display; slicker casing and an array of improvements over the immensely popular 8.9″ Aspire One. Can the new D150 be the top selling netbook just like the original one? Read the review to find out!
Design
The new Aspire One is built along the design of its older model. That said, there are some (welcome) design changes in the D150. For example: the shiny palm rest is now brushed metal finishing. The hinge has also undergone design change. We will cover these changes and other improvements one-by-one in the review
On the right side of the netbook, you will find that the rings on the side of the hinge are gone. They are now replaced by teardrop-shaped hinge, which looks great. On this side, you will find the Kensington lock, power port and 2 USB ports.
On the left side, you will find VGA port, LAN port, a USB port, earphone, microphone jack and multi-card reader.
On the front, you will find the WiFi toggle switch.
The Aspire One D150 is much less chunky than the other 10.1-inch netbooks like EEE 1000H and looks better too.
Display
The Acer Aspire One D150 is equipped with a 10.1-inch display which has 1024 x 600 resolution. Unlike most of the netbooks in the market, it has a glossy display. The colors are rich and images look vibrant.
Just over the display, you will find the 0.3MP camera, which I found decent enough for Skype video calls.
Keyboard
Most of the people go for the 10-inch netbooks for two reasons:
The bigger display allows the netbook manufactures to fit-in for the bigger ‘almost’ full-size keyboards. The keyboard of D150 is great to type on. Although, Acer could have fit in a bigger keyboard as there is some empty space on the sides. That said, the keyboard is a joy to use. I’d no problems in typing a document in the wordpad. With the EEE 1000H, I get nearly 90-100WPM and with the D150, I got 85WPM. May be I will improve with the usage.
I also appreciate the full size shift key and dedicated page-up and page-down buttons. In all the ASUS EEEs, you have to use the fn+up arrow combo to use the page-up function. Since, we use page-up and page-down functions quite a lot when browsing through long documents and web-pages, the dedicated keys improve the user-experience.
Another improvement is that the Acer has made the touchpad bigger and the vertical buttons previously found on the sides of the touchpad are now replaced by a single bar which is placed below the touchpad.
Speakers
The speakers are located at the bottom of the unit. They are loud enough for skype calls.
Memory
The Acer Aspire One D150 comes with a 160GB HDD and 1GB RAM. How do the HDD performs? Let’s see that in the benchmark test.
Benchmarks
Here are the results obtained by Crystal Disk Mark test:
..and for comparison, here are the results of EEE 1000H followed by EEE 1002HA (both use HDD):
As it can be easily observed, most of them performed similarly in the Crystal Disk Mark test. Here are Crytal Mark benchmark result:
Upgrading
Upgrading HDD and RAM in the older Aspire One was not an easy job. Acer listened to the complaints of the users and have made upgrading HDD and RAM extremely easy in the new D150 Aspire One. The RAM is upgradable to 2GB.
Connectivity
The D150 comes with all the latest connectivity radios that you would expect from a modern netbook. This include WiFi and BT (older aspire one did not have BT). However, the Aspire One D150 that I reviewed came with something extra: WiMax slot. Yes, if your network supports WiMax, just put in your SIM and boom! You can now enjoy mobile broadband.
Battery Life
Gone are the days, when the users cared less about the battery life. People expect to carry these netbooks everywhere they go and nobody wants to carry the charger with them as it just kills the point of mobility.
The D150 ships with 6-cell 5200mAh as standard in most of the countries, which simply gives mind-boggling battery life. In casual wifi surfing, it crossed 6 hours with ease and still had some juice left. This is better than the most of the 6-cell netbooks like EEE 1000H and MSI WIND U100.
It protrudes out from back though.
Charger
Charger should be as compact as possible in the netbooks. Older Aspire One came with a huge power brick. Acer has made the power brick smaller for the D150, which looks a lot like the one which is supplied with the latest EEE PCs.
Addons
The ACER bundles a nice neoprene case which does a much better job than the pathetic case that the ACER bundled with the older verison of the Acer Aspire one.
Acer has bundled eRecovery software for easy restore and backup of the HDD image. It lets you:
It also comes with eSobi, Google Desktop, trial of office 2007 and McAfee Security Center.
Some comparison pictures with the other popular netbooks
Final Verdict
The new Aspire One D150 offers a elegant and stylish design along with enough power to satisfy for your daily as-well-as mobile computing needs. And with the 6 hours-plus battery life and extremely affordable price ($350-$400 for 6-cell battery), it is a great bang for a buck. We recommend it.
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Pros:
Cons:
SONY VAIO P look-alikes are on fire now. The Wistron Firstbook is a Linux based netbook, which looks a lot like the VAIO P. It is a powerful machine with built-in 3G and 11.1-inch widescreen with Bluetooth and WiFi. It is running on the Snapdragon platform, which is also being used by Toshiba’s TG01, a windows mobile device. The Snapgradon consumes much less power as compared to the Atom processor, but it is also less capable than the Atom.
Samsung has made the N110 product page online now and is also now available for preorder at compsource at $458. It is a capable netbook with 10.1 inch screen; full size keyboard and incredible 9.5 battery life(!). Rest of the specs are pretty much standard netbook specifications which include Intel Atom N270 CPU, 1GB RAM and 160GB HDD.
[via]
We have already seen and heard a lot about the Dell Inspiron Mini 10. A couple of weeks back, it made its appearance at Dell’s website. Now, it is being launched in Japan with the new Atom Z520 processor.
