The sea of netbooks grows daily, although most models are fairly similar and make neither waves nor rings on the surface. Acer does however with its new Aspire One 571, a model that on the outside looks like most netbooks, but things are way different on the inside. This model is a direct competitor to Dell Inspiron Mini 10 by offering a 10.1″ display with 1280×720 pixel resolution and 16:9 format, but there is more…
Acer has geared Aspire One 571 toward the multimedia users since it not only comes with Intel’s Atom N280 processor but also the multimedia processor QV1721 from Quartics. This chip is mainly intended for decoding HD material and handles most of the popular formats, including H.264. But it can also encode these formats and sports hardware-based upscaling and filtering options.
The dock for Vmedia UMDs seen to the left of the touchpad
Acer has also chosen to equip 571 with an optical drive. What really makes the netbook stand out is that it is no regular DVD drive but for the rather unknown format Vmedia; with optic technology the information is stored on floppy-like UMD drives about the size of a SD memory card. Up to 1GB data can be stored on these drives but there are plans for a 2GB version and dual-sided discs for even more capacity.
Vmedia for mobile phones
Vmedia was in the media earlier on when it tried to break into the Indian market target mobile phones, but had little success, but now the focus has shifted to the netbook market.
The price of Aspire One 571 is still unknown, as is the launch date. Launch festival Computex isn’t far away though.
