Acer Aspire One 521 and 721 Netbooks Reach Europe

Acer, as consumers might know, has been one of the main advocates of the entry-level laptop market, otherwise known as the netbook market, for quite some time. As such, it is not at all surprising to hear that it is quite aggressively promoting each and every new such PC that it manages to put together. This is made especially obvious by the Aspire One 521 and Aspire One 721. This pair of netbooks of unusual size have finally managed to land in European stores.

Netbooks, as a market, excelled during 2009, and were one of the main reasons, if not the major reason, why the dismal performance of 2008 didn't repeat itself. Acer was especially productive on this segment, scoring significant revenues. The aforementioned two netbooks are part of the company's effort to propagate that success forward. They are even unusual, in a way, because they do not employ the now well-known Pine Trail platform.

Instead of the Intel Atom chips, the 10.1-inch Aspire One 521 and 11.6-inch Aspire One 721 have configurations centered around the AMD Athlon II Neo K125 central processing unit. This chip is backed up by 1GB of DDR3 (2GB on the AO721) memory and the ATI Radeon HD 4225 integrated graphics. The netbooks also boast 250GB hard disk drives and the full range of connectivity and I/O options that any laptop should have. Specifically, Gigabit Ethernet is present, as is a 1.3 megapixel webcam, a multi-gesture touchpad, a 93%-sized keyboard, 802.11 b/g/n WiFi and a 6-cell battery.

The AO521 and AO721 last for up to 7 and 5.5 hours on a single battery charge and are pre-loaded with Windows 7 Starter and Windows 7 Home Premium, respectively. European stores list them as available for shipment with price tags of 329 Euro and 399 Euro.