14 DAY TRIAL // Acer has seen a significant growth over the past year, especially thanks to its excellent marketing performance in the area of low-cost PCs, particularly netbooks. After having been reported to have no intention of approaching the tablet PC market any time soon, the company seems to be acting consistent with its statement that it will keep focusing on the notebook and netbook markets.
Most recently, Acer was reported to be working on a very thin laptop that, while rivaling Apple's MacBook Air in thinness, would be instrumental in the PC vendor's plans to outmatch HP as foremost PC supplier.
Acer was one of the main promoters of products based on the Intel Core 2 Duo ULV processors, especially considering that the hardware maker's Timeline range is almost exclusively based on such CPUs.
The system that Acer is now working on will use newer-generation ULV chips, Core i5 or Core i7, more precisely, which means that the new laptop will have better performance at less power. In addition, the ultraportable would be very thin but would still be able to approach full-size notebook performance.
If a Core i5 chip has 1.2GHz of performance, it can use TurboBoost to reach as high as 1.86GHz and its HyperThreading support can even enable it to work like a quad-core unit. This is what may allow Acer to design a strong ultraportable with a thinness of only 1.9cm, or 0.75 inches, which is the exact same thinness as Apple's MacBook Air. This is quite interesting, considering that this ultra-thinness is the foremost asset of the latter.
Not so long ago, Acer took Dell's place as second best PC supplier worldwide. The company now aims to use the growing share of netbooks and low-cost portable systems to further increase its market share, eventually overtaking Hewlett-Packard and becoming preeminent. It remains to be seen whether the former's 1.9cm-thick laptop will be competitive enough, price-wise, to achieve this goal.