June 29 - 11:05am EDT   Taiwanese PC builder Acer is poised to outpace Dell and get second place in PC industry market share, new insights show. The New York Times notes that Acer gained 3 percent world market share last year compared to a near-flat 0.1 percent for Dell and that the gap closed this past quarter to just 2 percent. The difference is attributed to a clearer focus on PCs than Dell as well as an emphasis on lower-cost systems and a much leaner inventory system that sees Acer worry less about stock. [full story]

June 26 - 10:55am EDT   Acer on Friday announced it has redesigned its Acer Aspire M5, M3 and X3 Series of consumer desktops, including the high-end Aspire M5800 with its brushed metal chassis, the value-oriented Aspire M3800 and the small form factor Acer Aspire X3810. The Aspire M5800 sports a silver chassis that matches the keyboard, speakers and mouse, with all featuring chrome and dark gray accents. The card reader, audio jacks and USB ports are on behind a hinged door on the front of the chassis. [full story]

June 26 - 8:30am EDT   Acer on Friday extended its High Definition Series LCDs by one model and added the H235H. The 23-inch display is smaller than the older H243H but improves on its image quality: it has the same 1080p resolution but more than doubles the dynamic contrast ratio to 100,000:1 while preserving a 300cd/m2 brightness. Accordingly, it doubles as an HDTV-friendly monitor with stereo speakers and an HDMI input to go along with the DVI and VGA ports. [full story]

June 23 - 3:05pm EDT   The Splashtop instant-on platform from DeviceVM is coming to Sony's VAIO NW-series notebook PCs and Acer's AspireRevo nettop PCs, as per a pair of Tuesday launches. Sony's implementation of the platform is called Quick Web Access, while Acer calls its RevoBoot. In either case, Splashtop, which could be described as a lightweight Linux operating system, allows users to access the Internet within a few seconds but without having to boot the full operating system. [full story]

June 22 - 9:40am EDT   Acer on Monday added three 16:9 ratio notebooks to its media-centric Gemstone Blue designs that all focus on price over raw performance. The 15.6-inch, LED-backlit Aspire 5739G is the fastest of the trio with a 2.1GHz Core 2 Duo, 4GB of RAM, a 250GB hard drive, an 8X Blu-ray drive and a GeForce GT 130M for video. It comes with a multi-touch trackpad and ships at the end of June for a particularly low $750, making it the least expensive new Blu-ray notebook today. [full story]

June 18 - 4:20pm EDT   Acer in Japan on Thursday announced the release of two new LCD monitors that have an emphasis on eco-friendliness with power consumption ratings that are reduced by 36 percent compared to previous models. The 19-inch Acer V193WBbmd and 22-inch Acer V223WBbmd both offer a 5ms response time, 10,000:1 contrast ratio, and 300cd/m2 brightness. [full story]

June 10 - 12:20pm EDT   In response to last week's accusations by the Russian government that Microsoft is pulling copies of its Windows XP operating system from store shelves early, the Microsoft Russia CEO Nikolai Pryanishnikov on Wednesday said the software maker will fully resolve the related issues. The regional chief said Microsoft Russia has received documents containing the issues and believes they can be addressed "without any problems." [full story]

June 9 - 12:30pm EDT   Acer could be introducing a smaller Timeline that may ultimately kill the high end of its netbooks, a rumor from Taiwan's PC industry indicates. An 11.6-inch version of the Timeline is purportedly tapped for July and, DigiTimes says, will create pressure in the category. To avoid a conflict with the same-size Aspire One 751h netbook, Acer is believed to be either cutting the price of the 751h or else phasing it out entirely. [full story]

June 8 - 8:25am EDT   Acer's mobile computing VP Campbell Kan today said his company is developing a notebook with a 3D display for late October. The first model should have a 15.6-inch screen and will both recognize 3D movies natively as well as convert typical movies to a pseudo-3D format. Whether or not it will support 3D games isn't mentioned, but Kan tells DigiTimes it will initially require stereoscopic glasses like most existing displays. [full story]

June 5 - 2:15pm EDT   BenQ late Thursday confirmed that it was developing its first devices to use Google's Android as an operating system. Both a smartphone and a netbook are due to use the mobile OS and should be available sometime next year. What features they would have isn't definitive at this stage, though Android is designed around touchscreen interfaces for phones and requires relatively little hardware to run smoothly either on phones or on full computers. [full story]

June 5 - 8:35am EDT   Acer's just-revealed plans to build Android netbooks won't actually replace Windows, company chief JT Wang revealed on Friday. The executive said that these systems will instead dual-boot both Android and Windows. While disappointing to those who had expected the move to be a return to Linux-only systems, Wang maintained that the market for Android is too uncertain to rely only on that platform. [full story]

June 3 - 4:40pm EDT   At a press conference at Computex in Taiwan on Wednesday, PC maker Acer announced it will soon offer the Moblin Linux operating system in its products. This will include Aspire One nettop PCs and regular notebook and desktop PCs. Several Moblin-powered Aspire One netbooks are currently being shown at Computex, along with netbooks from other manufacturers, albeit there was more than one version of Moblin. The Linux-based operating system was developed by Intel to get the most out of the Atom CPU used in ultra-portable netbook PCs. [full story]

June 3 - 12:15pm EDT   Acer has been showing two of its Tempo-series handsets, codenamed F1 and L1, first shown at CES in January, at the Computex show in Taiwan. The display model for the F1 revealed some of the smartphone's specs, including a particularly quick 1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon CPU and Windows Mobile 6.5 Professional for its operating system. It also centers on a large 3.8-inch, 800x480 touchscreen. [full story]

June 2 - 10:25am EDT   Acer at Computex today said it would be the first to produce netbooks using Google's Android platform. Company IT product president Jim Wong expects the systems to appear in the summer and that the Linux-based systems will still use Intel Atom processors. He didn't provide prices, though the Android netbooks should be less expensive than Windows versions as Google doesn't charge for licenses where Microsoft asks for $15 for each copy of Windows XP. [full story]

June 2 - 9:05am EDT   Acer today provided US details of its Timeline notebooks using Intel's new CULV platform for ultraportables. The least expensive of the group is also the largest and starts with the 15.6-inch AS5810TZ-4657; it costs $598 with a 1.3GHz Pentium, 3GB of memory, a 320GB hard drive and an internal DVD burner. It totes the Timeline series' multi-touch trackpad as well as 802.11n Wi-Fi, a webcam and HDMI output. [full story]