Acer Unveils Various Form Factor Aspire PCs

Acer this week launched several consumer-oriented, mobile devices within its Aspire product line, including a netbook equipped with AMD's Fusion integrated CPU-GPU processors.

Acer on Wednesday began shipping its Aspire One AO522 netbook, which offers several entertainment features, including HD video viewing, graphics-intensive gaming, and surround sound. This is the same device as the previous Aspire One AO522 netbook with the sole addition of a dual-core AMD Brazos C-50 accelerated processing unit (APU) running at 1 GHz. It runs Windows 7 Starter and comes in either black or olive green.

The 10.1-inch Aspire netbook also comes with an LED back-lit display with 1280 x 800 pixel resolution and a 250GB 5400RPM hard drive disk and a 5-in-1 Card Reader. The device includes built-in Wi-Fi connectivity, a 1.3-megapixel Webcam, three USB 2.0 ports, an HDMI output, and a 6-cell Li-ion Battery offering up to 6-hours of battery life. The Acer Aspire One AO522-BZ897 is available from Amazon at a list price of $329.99.

Based on two x86 'Bobcat' cores and an integrated Radeon HD 6250 discrete graphics card with Direct X11 support, Brazos belongs to the Ontario family of AMD Fusion products. AMD launched the Fusion platform at CES 2011, where several manufacturers displayed PCs featuring the new solution alongside the similar, new Intel Sandy Bridge and Nvidia Tegra 2 offerings.

AMD is hoping Fusion will drive growth in its graphics segment in 2011, after the company reported financial earnings for 2010 that relied heavily on its graphics business.

On Tuesday, Acer unveiled its E100 netbook, which is similar to the Aspire One AO522 device, except that it will feature an Intel Atom processor -- although the company has not revealed which one. The device includes a 250-GB hard drive, 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 2.1 as well as 1 GB of DDR memory. The E100 netbook is aimed at the education segment, and includes several features geared toward the classroom. It comes with Acer's Classroom Manager software, allowing teachers and students to connect to a classroom network, and software developed by European Schoolnet -- which aims to bring IT to classroom environments -- as well as optional school names and logos inscribed on the chassis.

Acer did not offer details regarding pricing and availability.

Next: The Aspire Z5761 All-In-One

Finally, on Wednesday Acer introduced its Aspire Z5761 all-in-one desktop geared toward consumers seeking entertainment options. The device includes multi-touch functionality, with the Acer TouchPortal for touch-enhanced applications. The Aspire Z5761 also includes TouchBrowser, which is designed for a user-friendly Web-browsing experience, along with TouchVideo, TouchPhoto and TouchCam. Each of these features relies on Acer's clear.fi platform for sharing multimedia content.

The Aspire Z5761 comes with built-in Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 2.1 connectivity options, as well as built-in microphone and high definition Webcam. The device runs on a second-generation Intel core processor with Intel Turbo Boost 2.0 technology for faster processing speeds. It offers up to 1.5 TB of storage, up to 8 GB of DDR3, and a total of eight USB ports supplies.

Acer did not offer details regarding pricing and availability.