14 DAY TRIAL // The bare minimum of performance capabilities, a long battery life and a low price point are the main three features that have stood behind netbooks' rise to fame and have given Intel more than enough of a reason to unleash its Pine Trail platform. With the market slowly getting saturated, however, better specs at similar prices are slowly becoming the next logical step and the one thing that could convince users to make an update. Acer seems to think that variety is also a factor, which is why it moved away from Atom and put in higher graphics capabilities compared with the most entry-level laptops released so far.
Acer has made no official announcements, but Macles seems to have landed a number of photos and a list of partial specifications of the Aspire one 521. Apparently, instead of using the utterly predictable Intel Atom CPU, the new device is based on the AMD V105 chip, which has a clock speed of 1.2GHz. At first glance, this speed may seem quite inferior compared with the one of the N450, but this may not be much of a drawback when seeing that it has DDR3 support, 512KB L2 cache and a TDP of 9W. Unfortunately, the amount of RAM and most other specs are still a mystery, except for one crucial detail.
The Aspire One 521 boasts an ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4225, which has a 384MB dedicated video memory. This particular video component is not exactly released either, but it is probably a slightly improved version of the 4200. This means that, depending on how much RAM and storage space the mobile PC ends up with, Flash HD and certain games like World of Warcraft will be able to run on it. For those that travel frequently, this may turn out to be quite an asset.
The report says that battery life is estimated at about seven hours and that Bluetooth 3.0+HS will be supported. Unfortunately, there is no indication of where and when this Aspire One model will be made available, but its chrome-plated logo and overall design should at least grab some attention when the time comes, that is, if the UVD2 support and HDMI don't manage to turn heads on their own.