Hardware Archive

Acer has stated that it has lowered its expectations for netbook sales for this year. Instead of selling between 12-15 million netbooks, the company now believes it will ship 10-12 million netbooks.

George Heilmeier is widely known as the father of the LCD. But he abandoned his liquid crystal baby nearly forty years ago. In 1964, as a researcher at RCA's corporate lab in Princeton, New Jersey, Heilmeier uncovered the electro-optical properties of molecular and liquid crystals. And four years later, at an RCA press conference in New York City, he showed the world the first crude forerunners of today's ubiquitous liquid crystal displays. But by 1970, as his liquid crystals languished amidst the petty internal politics at RCA, Heilmeier left his seminal research behind. And if he looks back, it's only because he's encouraged to. Asked if he feels a certain pride when he walks into one of those massive electronics retailers where countless LCD TVs line the walls, he demurs. "To be honest with you, that's something for my grandchildren to do," he tells The Register, "Not me."

In the current economic climate, it's hard to make any sane predictions one way or the other. While we receive continuous reports that netbooks are the saving grace of the PC market, the light at the end of the tunnel, the beacon of hope, the Fiona Apple among the rest of the mediocre musician crowd, the, err, (okay I'm out of metaphors), we are now getting a report which states that during the first quarter of 2009, netbooks have not met their sales estimates.

Thus far it seems that netbooks with Windows XP and Intel Atom processors have been the most successful, leaving little room for other players. There have been those who doubt ARM's longevity in this particular market, so we decided to interview some of the folks at ARM. They told OSNews that the company is confident about its current and future mobile markets, and Linux, which will soon be on various ARM-powered netbooks, is one of the reasons why.

After the rather unexpected success of the netbook, manufacturers started looking for more ways to capitalise on the cheaper end of the market. Many of them are now putting netbook internals (the Atom platform) in desktop computers, such as nettops and cheaper all-in-one solutions. According to several analysts, this is going to be one of the few places where the desktop market can grow. And while we're on the subject of hardware, TechRepublic took the Dell Adamo apart to see its internals.

We've been waiting a while to see NVIDIA's Ion-based computers, and now Acer is taking the lead in this race by debuting the first Ion "nettop" since the ones shown off at CES by NVIDIA: the Acer AspireRevo. This little 7.1- x 7.1- x 1.2-inch box sports an 1.6GHz Intel Atom, up to four gigabytes of RAM, a 250 GB hard drive, Four-in-one card reader, six USB sockets, Ethernet, and HDMI and VGA outputs while running Windows Vista Home Premium or Basic. It'll be able to play any of your 1080p content, of course. There isn't any word on when Acer will start rolling these out to consumers nor what the said consumers will be paying, but since it's likely that other Ion-based nettops will begin to appear at large come summer, the AspireRevo will most likely be up for grabs near the end of the second quarter. I suppose it's safe to say that the desktop equivalent to the netbook is coming.