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 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 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 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]

May 29 - 8:25am EDT   Pixel Qi late yesterday demonstrated its unique 3-in-1 hybrid display, known as the 3qi. The technology works as a traditional, backlit LCD but can switch its backlight off and convert to an e-paper mode. Besides saving battery life, the switch renders the display more readable in bright light. A third mode keeps the display in LCD mode but puts in monochrome to save energy. [full story]

May 21 - 7:30am EDT   Acer on Thursday contributed its own more frugal entry into the home server space within the US through the Aspire easyStore Home Server AH340. Similar to HP's MediaSmart LX195, the easyStore runs on a 1.6GHz Atom to manage traffic to and from the server without the cost overhead of other processors. Acer's larger design, however, affords it four 3.5-inch drive bays that can take as much as 8TB of storage if completely filled. [full story]

May 18 - 8:40am EDT   Acer today expanded the Aspire One line in the US to include its two newest netbooks. The 751h, previewed last month, is Acer's largest-ever netbook with a 11.6-inch, 1364x768 display and a full-size keyboard. It uses Intel's newer 1.22GHz Atom Z520 to emphasize power efficiency: its 6-cell battery pack is estimated to last for 8 hours. [full story]

May 15 - 12:45pm EDT   A new version of Acer's Aspire One netbook has emerged, according to reports. Dubbed the 571, the machine is said to be based on the chassis of a D150 or D250, also using most of the same internal specifications. Its 10.1-inch display is said to have been upgraded to support 1280x720, though, in a 16:9 widescreen ratio. Aiding the encoding and decoding of HD and H.264 video is a Quartics coprocessor. [full story]

May 4 - 4:00pm EDT   AT&T is about to expand its netbook tie-ins to include the 10-inch Acer Aspire One, according to a leaked memo. A source passing on the note to BGR says that at least Costco will be selling a version of the portable with 3G ready to be used with AT&T's network. Other details are unclear, but the systems are likely to have some of their cost subsidized and also to sell at AT&T stores. [full story]

April 15 - 10:05am EDT   Acer on Wednesday updated its Aspire notebooks for the US with more details of the 3935 and 8935 models destined for the country. The 3935 is Acer's most direct competition for the unibody MacBook and measures just 1 inch thick while weighing less than 4.2 pounds. It also centers on a 13.3-inch, LED-backlit screen but has a 16:9 ratio, 1366x768 resolution and a bronze-colored aluminum skin. Also partly influenced by Apple are a chiclet-style keyboard and a multi-touch trackpad for scrolling and zooming. [full story]

April 8 - 11:25am EDT   At the same time as it announced the Aspire One 11.6-inch netbook on Tuesday, Acer also said it would soon release the 13.3-inch Acer Aspire 3935 notebook, the 15.6-inch Aspire 5935 and 18.4-inch Aspire 8935. The ultra-portable 3935 will be less than one-inch thick and available only in a golden brown color. To make typing easier and more comfortable, Acer gives the Aspire 3935 the same larger "chiclet" keyboard as the Timeline, along with touch-sensitive shortcut keys. Like in the Aspire One and Timeline, the 3935 has a multi-touch trackpad for pinch and other gestures. [full story]

March 10 - 4:00pm EDT   A slimmed-down version of Acer's Aspire One netbook was spotted late last month, and now the FCC has passed the netbook through its testing, according to a filing. While the netbook remains unnamed, some FCC documentation is referring to it as the Acer Aspire One 530, though this could just be referring to a possible use of Intel's 1.6GHz Atom Z530 CPU instead of the usual N270 or N280 as it goes against Acer's usual naming conventions. [full story]

February 27 - 2:15pm EST   The Taiwan-area newspaper Commercial Times claims today that ASUS is in the middle of developing a netbook that would be even higher end than the existing S101. Nicknamed the Eee PC Shell, the 10-inch system would have some form of "higher specification" than the current designer model and would be simultaneously more portable as well as longer-lasting than the existing mini notebook. Target pricing for the Shell would reportedly hover between the equivalents of $486 and $571, or about $100 to $150 more than a typical 10-inch system. [full story]

February 26 - 4:50pm EST   Acer Japan recently announced it will soon launch its network attached storage PC, the Aspire easyStore H340. The NAS uses Intel's 1.6GHz Atom CPU, along with 1GB of RAM and the 945GC Express mainboard. The PC runs Windows Home Server operating system and can share its multimedia content, including photos, videos and music with up to 10 connected PCs. The four-bay NAS is offered in two versions, with a 1TB drive or three 1TB drives preinstalled into it. [full story]