The Acer Iconia A510 Olympic tablet will be reaching the UK in June through Carphone Warehouse. The special-edition tablet shares the specs of the Iconia Tab A510, with the main differences being an engraving of the Olympic rings on the back and a pre-loaded trial of Eurosport Player, to watch the broadcaster's Olympic coverage.
Apple led the market in mobile PC shipments during the March quarter, at least when including the iPad, according to preliminary NPD data. The company shipped 17.2 million iPads and MacBooks, representing a 118 percent jump year-over-year, and 22.5 percent marketshare during Q1. About 80 percent of those units were iPads though, whereas the other top sellers succeeded on the basis of notebook shipments.
Tizen, the operating system developed as a partnership between Intel and Samsung, may finally debut on smartphones in the second half of this year. The scalable OS, sources tell Digitimes, will be appearing on smartphones, tablets, and notebooks from a number of different manufacturers.
According to new figures out from analyst firm Canalys, Q1 2012 saw Apple slip from the top spot in the client PC market. Thanks to a boost in shipments, former number one company HP retook its perch atop the market for at least one quarter. The report, though, may signal troubles ahead for PC manufacturers, as it suggests seismic trends at work in the marketplace.
On April 29, Acer will release a new iteration of its Aspire notebook line with Intel's third-generation Core processor inside. In addition to a 2.1GHz Core i7 processor, the new Aspire will support up to 8GB of RAM, and comes with a 750GB hard drive.
Amazon's Kindle Fire now makes up the absolute majority of the Android tablet platform in the US, comScore found in a fresh study. The e-reader and tablet crossover represented 54.4 percent of all Android tablets sold in the country. At second place, the entire Samsung Galaxy Tab lineup comprised just 15.4 percent of Android slates.
Acer in discussing its latest results at an investor's conference was hopeful that this was a sign of a widescale resurgence in PCs for the industry. Its climb from 10.1 percent share in the fall to 10.9 percent this winter was a sign the company's "competitiveness is coming back," according to chairman JT Wang, and that Acer would climb back to third place while Dell sank. Demand for the spring would be typical in light of world economic troubles, but it would grow in earnest in 2012 and expand to more than 10 percent in 2013.
Android 4.0 has arrived just a couple of days earlier than previously billed for Acer's Iconia Tab A500, according to reports from Android Central. The OS update had been scheduled to arrive April 27.
PC maker Acer and sub-brand Gateway have revealed a couple of new PCs, the Predator AG3620 and the DX4860-UR14P, respectively. Both lines will offer Intel's latest Ivy Bridge processors. Acer will get the new chips first, however, starting with the 3.4GHz Core i7-3770.
Intel has set ambitious targets for the number of ultrabooks it hopes will sell this year, part suppliers understood late Wednesday. Supposed internal roadmap details passed on to Digitimes had between 20 million to 30 million ultrabooks shipping in 2012. That number would double or triple in 2013, according to the claims, as the supply chain would be truly ready for mainstream adoption, such as reinforced plastic to emulate the rigidity of metal without some of the cost.
Taiwan-area contract manufacturers claimed Wednesday that Intel and Microsoft have ambitious aims of reducing the iPad's dominance of tablets. The Digitimes contacts understood the Wintel combination wanted the iPad down from 70 percent share, as it has had in the past, to under 50 percent by mid-2013. For Intel, Lenovo's strength in its native China would be a key factor.
Following a formal US launch late last month, Acer has started selling the Iconia Tab A510 in the US. The Android 4.0 tablet is currently in stock from Acer, and presumably resellers, at its quoted $450 price for a 32GB Wi-Fi model. Buying from Acer itself gets the Olympic Game Edition, which has the competition's logo on the back but is otherwise similar to the reference design.
Intel had relatively lackluster results that showed a dampened PC environment with most of its hope resting in the future. Its revenue was flat from year to year, at $12.9 billion. Intel hadn't divulged its exact PC Client group revenue in 2011 results, but it noted that the mostly desktop- and notebook-focused group's revenue was down seven percent from this past fall, to $8.5 billion.
Acer has released the K130 mini DLP travel projector. The device is a lightweight DLP 3D-ready projector, yet weighs a pound and has a footprint smaller than half a sheet of A4 paper.
Intel may move up the launch of its Ivy Bridge processors by nearly a week. Notebook builders claimed early Thursday to Digitimes that the formal release would occur April 23, six days earlier than widely leaked. Why wasn't mentioned, but it would imply better supply than anticipated.
Both Gartner and IDC provided early estimates of winter 2012 market share that showed Apple making big strides in the US. The two gave the Mac a tentative share of 10 or 10.6 percent, in either case enough to put it in third place. Both saw rapidly falling Acer and Toshiba below Apple in share.
Intel PC Client general manager Kirk Skaugen used a keynote at the Beijing edition of the Intel Developer Forum to predict a heavy saturation of the ultrabook market. He saw ultrabook prices reaching down to $699 by the back-to-school period at the end of the summer, or down from the $899 and up more common today. About 75 models were in development for all of 2012, including some touchscreen models mostly intended for Windows 8.
InterDigital has announced that it has established new licensing agreements with Acer and Pantech. The latter companies have agreed to pay InterDigital royalties for several new products, such as tablets, that were said to be excluded from original agreements related to 2G, 3G and 4G technologies.
Acer has just begun shipping its C120 pico projector. The portable device is optionally USB-powered and has a native 864x480 resolution, but can also show 1280x800-pixel images. The DLP projector can produce 100 ANSI lumens of brightness from its LED lamp, though that number goes down to 75 when only on USB power.
Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) settled its lawsuit over Wi-Fi patents on Monday. The deal with US carriers AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon, as well as PC designers Acer, Lenovo, and Sony, was worth $220 million in local currency, or $229 million US. CSIRO hadn't ruled out more patent lawsuits, although it didn't file for patents in the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China) area or the wider Latin America area.
Streaming TV show and movie provider Hulu on Thursday announced it has made its Hulu Plus service on seven new Android tablets. This includes the Acer Iconia Tab line, ASUS Transformer Prime and Eee Pad Transformer, LG G-Slate, Motorola Xoom, Motorola Xyboard 10.1, and Toshiba Thrive. The app (free, Google Play) will become available for more Android tablets in the future as well, Hulu added.
A pair of rumors have four major Windows PC builders coming back after a hard 2011. Acer and ASUS were said by Digitimes to be both avoiding the traditional post-holiday slump. ASUS was purportedly seeing a PC shipment drop of 10 percent, or half as much as it had expected, while Acer was not only expected to match the roughly six million PCs shipped in the fall but possibly exceed the amount, up to 6.2 million.
NVIDIA has paired up the GeForce GTX 680 launched Thursday with its first notebook graphics sharing the same Kepler architecture. The GeForce GT 640M LE, GT 640M, GT 650M, and GTX 660M all use the new 28-nanometer building process both to be smaller and cooler than their ancestors as well as up the core count and clock speeds. They peak at 384 cores on the 640M, 650M and 660M and up to either 735MHz or 850MHz on the 660M, depending on whether or not it's using GDDR5 or DDR3 memory.
Acer on early Thursday detailed the North American version of the Iconia Tab A510, its first real answer to the new iPad. The quad-core Tegra 3 tablet will reach the US and Canada with 32GB of storage in both black- and silver-backed versions. Every version ships with a 10-inch, 1280x800 display, a five-megapixel rear camera, a front one-megapixel camera, and mini HDMI video out.
Microsoft's Windows 8 ARM tablet rollout has had a rough schedule possibly outlined in a rumor late Tuesday. Acer, ASUS, Dell, HP, and Lenovo were said by Digitimes' part supplier contacts to be the ones hand-picked for the October release. The Nokia tablet might follow a month later, in November.
Continuing some of the more in-depth examinations of the new iPad, a detailed screen comparison at DisplayMate has shown a major improvement in Apple's tablet display quality, albeit at a cost. While the 2048x1536 resolution is an obvious advantage, the display analysis team saw that the new screen saw big improvements in other areas, most of all color accuracy. While the iPad 2's display got just 61 percent of the standard color range, the new iPad's screen was near-flawless, with 99 percent accuracy on top of "perfect" contrast and gamma levels.
A fresh comparison has validated many of the suspicions that the new iPad's A5X may well be faster than NVIDIA's Tegra 3 processor in a large number of tests. Apple's slate, despite competing against a quad-core chip from a company considered an expert in graphics, was faster in visually-oriented tests conducted by Laptop. While a standard GLBenchmark test showed it about 13 percent faster, a texture fill rate test in the same suite showed it having almost five times the processing power in that area.
Hardware maker Acer will bring out its AcerCloud online storage service this April, DigiTimes claimed. This launch will be restricted to mainland China and North America only, however, with other countries going live in the fourth quarter of the year. It will come to PCs as well as Android and Windows Phone mobile operating systems, with iOS support coming in the near future, the company hinted.
Acer has introduced the Aspire Timeline Ultra M3-581TG, an ultrabook that is claimed to be the first to be equipped with one of NVIDIA's Kepler-based GPUs. The GeForce GT 640M card is claimed to enable the ultrabook to play Battlefield 3 on the game's highest detail settings on the 15.6-inch 1366x768 display.
Acer showed signs of returning to health on Tuesday through both monthly results and remarks from company president Jim Wong. Its February revenue was up 38 percent from the month before, to the equivalent of nearly $1.3 billion. Wong framed it to Digitimes and others as part of a larger recovery, where Acer would return to third place in notebooks sometime in 2012.
ASUS' ultrabook refreshes could include some of the first truly discounted, mainstream ultrabooks. New leaks stemming from the same source for The Verge had two 13.3-inch models, the UX32A and UX32Vd, coming in at under $800. Both would still get Intel's low voltage Ivy Bridge Core i3, i5, and i7 processors, but only sometime after they shipped; initial batches would use the outgoing Sandy Bridge generation, insiders said.
An unusually ambitious patent lawsuit filed late last week, and published Monday, is hoping to profit from the rest of the industry's work. Largely unknown NovelPoint Security LLC has sued 35 mostly major companies over two patents for a "method for limiting computer access to peripheral devices" and a "network security system allowing access" based on master tokens. The sweeping nature of the patent includes virtually every major PC and electronics builder, including Acer, Apple, ASUS, Dell, HP, Lenovo, Panasonic, Samsung, Sony, and Toshiba.
Google's rumored Nexus-like Android tablet has once more been attached to ASUS by a leak late Thursday. The seven-inch tablet was now thought by Digitimes' contacts to be coming as soon as May for between $199 to $249. ASUS had been picked because it could manufacture the devices itself and had "good product quality."
Following news that Acer is selling its Aspire S3 ultrabook at a strictly break-even price of $799, a new report suggests that second-tier Taiwanese manufacturers are planning on releasing ultrabook-like notebooks as cheap as $600. The Taiwanese vendors plan on releasing ultra-slim notebooks that look like ultrabooks, but are made of plastic. For notebooks to be able to carry the official Intel Ultrabook tag, they must be made of aluminum and other premium components including SSDs.
Acer's Christoph Pohlmann in remarks Tuesday at CeBIT revealed that the company was selling ultrabooks at extremely thin margins. The base version of the Aspire S3 was being sold at a stricty break-even price at $799, he mentioned to The Verge. It was only viable at all as higher-end models had enough of a premium to make a small profit.
Intel ended one of the longest waits for one of its processors in recent memory on Tuesday by launching and detailing the Xeon E5-2600. Its mid-range server and workstation chip is a superset of the much newer Sandy Bridge-E architecture and can carry a full eight cores (up from six) and handle a much larger 768GB memory ceiling. The extra cores, along with a shrink from 45 to 32 nanometers and new AVX support, should make it about 80 percent faster than the Xeon 5600 it replaces.
Acer used Germany's CeBIT expo to unveil a pair of new notebooks to take its 2012 roster in new directions. The Timeline Ultra M3 stretches the definition of an ultrabook with a 15-inch screen and an optical drive, counting mostly on its 0.79-inch thickness as an edge. Its true rarity is the inclusion of dedicated graphics: it can afford to fit a GeForce GT 640M for video, making it useful for games.
An uncommon instance of two dovetailing rumors may have divulged the final name of the next iPad. Both CNET and VentureBeat understood from sources that it would be called the iPad HD to emphasize the high-resolution 2048x1536 screen. While still going mostly on word, it came just after accessories had turned up making an association with the name.
Rumors that the iPad 3 might get a price hike were theoretically debunked in a form of counter-rumor on Friday. Prices are expected by a familiar 9to5 source to be the same as they are for the iPad 2 despite the anticipated 2048x1536 screen, faster processor, and upgraded camera. Talk of cutting off a 64GB model and possibly adding an 8GB iPad 2 were tossed aside as well, with at least the iPad 3 still sitting at the 16GB, 32GB, and 64GB capacities of today.
Lenovo on Friday stopped selling netbooks through its own website. The models that were depleted won't be replaced in the web store "in the near future," the computer maker's rep revealed. Whether the netbooks will continue to be sold in retail stores hasn't been detailed.
Acer had a much more subdued presence at Mobile World Congress this year, having spent most of its energy at CES. However, it did have two new smartphones to show in Barcelona, and arguably some of its best devices yet. Read through for hands-on time with the CloudMobile and Liquid Glow.
Corning's Gorilla Glass 2 unveiled at CES has shipped to device makers, and consumers will be able to buy these products sometime this spring, likely by May, the company revealed. The new damage-resistant glass is said to be slimmer, offer brighter images, and have greater touch sensitivity than its predecessor. Some of the companies that confirmed tablets that will use Gorilla Glass 2 at MWC include ASUS and Acer.
Acer has followed up the CloudMobile with a second smartphone due at Mobile World Congress. The Liquid Glow will carry Acer's lightly skinned version of Android 4.0, but with a more modest 3.7-inch display. The newer, curvier design will be its own highlight, with colors such as Alpine White and Sakura Pink on the back that will be matched to the display at the front.
Apple was the lead mobile PC vendor in the fourth quarter of 2011 and the rest of the year, at least when including tablets, an NPD DisplaySearch report shows. The company shipped just under 23.4 million MacBooks and iPads in the fourth quarter, and more than 62.8 million for the entire year. NPD observes, though, that almost 80 percent of Apple's numbers were iPads, estimated at 18.7 million in Q4, and 48.4 million for the whole year.
Intel may make up for its Ivy Bridge processor delay by selling at substantially lower prices. New rumors from part suppliers claimed to Digitimes that processor prices would typically be $60 to $70 lower, presumably relative to the current-generation Sandy Bridge-era chips. The move could lead to faster processors at similar prices or, more likely, less expensive systems overall.
Lenovo has climbed to the top of Rescuecom's computer reliability ratings for the beginning of 2012, achieving a significantly higher score than its competitors. Apple has fallen to fourth in the lineup, despite maintaining a stronger rating in past years and achieving a surge in overall market share, with a score that is just over half of Lenovo's rating.
Acer has revealed the official timeline for updating its range of Iconia Tabs to Android 4.0. The 10.1-inch A200 is currently getting the update in the US, while the 10-inch A500 and 7-inch A100 will get the software in April. As part of the update, the A500 and A100 will get the Acer Ring launcher, the company's own customization that lets users make shortcuts, capture screenshots, and more.
The specs for the forthcoming ASUS Transformer TF300T have leaked courtesy of Table Two. They reveal a device that is likely to be pitched head-to-head with the Acer A510 as it is powered by an NVIDIA Tegra 3 clocked at 1.2GHz, matched with 1GB of RAM. Both devices also center on a 10.1-inch IPS display with a resolution of 1280x800 and run Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich).
Acer's mid-range Android 4.0 tablet, the Iconia Tab A510, has gotten considerably closer to a possible US launch after an FCC approval Wednesday. While the filing is focused on wireless and just confirms that it's a Wi-Fi only version, it shows the 10-inch slate getting close to a probable US release. European tips had put it in April.
RIM's BlackBerry PlayBook may have seen the same effect on tablet share in Canada as its close cousin the Kindle Fire did in the US, Solutions Research Group said Wednesday. Having had as little as five percent in the fall, it's now estimated to be up to 15 percent of tablets in its home country through the price cut to $200. The shift would have dropped the iPad's share from 86 percent to 68 percent, the Globe and Mail was told.
