Acer, one of the world’s largest PC makers, today highlighted its new 2012 line up of products.
Acer’s new “ultrabook” is the Acer Aspire Timeline Ultra M3. It features NVIDIA graphics hardware and is only 20 millimeters thick. Acer claims it is the first two-spindle, full-featured, 15-inch “ultrabook” with approximately eight hours of battery life.
Acer is aiming its M series at an in-between market. Sumit Agnihotry, vice president of product marketing for Acer’s Americas region says the product will straddle the “rare territory” between a flagship product and a product that is accessible for mainstream users.
I don’t know of any real people that would fit into that category, but Agnihotry seems to think there are plenty of them:
“It’s for the consumers who are looking for a laptop that will meet their needs today but also anticipate the things they’ll be doing nine months to a year out,” Agnihotry says. “You are able to multitask, play premium video games and so on, but at the same time, it’s portable enough that you can take it with you at any time. Looking at that experience overall, we think it’s something that will become a must-have instead of nice-to-have today.”
Here’s a pic of this “must-have” laptop looking very shiny:
Acer worked with Microsoft engineers to improve the boot-up speed and battery life of the device. About the boot-up time, Senior Director on the OEM engineering team at Microsoft Johnny Liu said, “Today Acer’s fastest system, the S series, is coming in around four seconds, down from about nine seconds as recently as last year. We’re collaborating on the M series to achieve similar results,”
Other 2012 products highlighted by Acer include the lightweight TravelMate TimelineX, the new S3 “ultrabook,” the super-thin (15 millimeters thick) S5, and the Aspire Z5 series of all-in-one PCs that feature high definition touchscreens (pictured below).
This all sounds pretty good, but we’ll have to wait for the reviews to see if Acer has created products of high enough quality to succeed in the space between Apple’s high-end laptops and netbooks. Acer has not yet announced pricing specs for these products.