Book N Tech

Tuesday, June 5, 2012

Acer and Asus potential market shakers


     Acer and Asus are great on the lines of innovation and low price quality tablets, ultrabooks, and netbooks. At this years Computex Acer and Asus have featured some potentially ground breaking devices. Acer has a history of cheap netbooks and great top line Android tablets with their new Olympic Iconia 500. Acer has made a good name in the mobile market most notably for their netbooks and tablets. Asus had a similar fate except they featured the Eee PC line of convertible netbooks which are some of the only of their kind up unto this point. Asus has the most top of the line Android tablet which outweighs the Motorola Xoom and Xyboard and Samsung Galaxy tab series by a mile. The Transformer Prime TF3001 is the latest model to date until the Transformer Pad Infinity comes out in a bit which really proves Android's superior hardware capabilities. These companies are both offering new Windows 8/ RT capable devices with 1366 x 768 minimum screen resolutions (some are higher) and both offer beautiful and in some ways revolutionary designs that really are going to shake up the current market. First the Acer lineup courtesy of Engadget who has the best comprehensive coverage on the ground floor. 
The Acer Aspire series is what I call the worlds "biggest tablet and thinnest all in one" device which truly blows away the I Mac competition. At 27 inches and can be held in your hands it is to me a new concept barring Steve Ballmer's 80 inch in his office.  Acer introduces Windows 8 all-in-one U Series at Computex 2012 
It has a capacitive 64 finger touch screen that can swivel any way you wish. so far Acer has been very mum on the details and will come in a 27 inch and 23 inch flavors. Acer unveils 116inch Iconia W700, 101inch W510 Windows 8 tablets 

The Acer W510 and W710 are similar to the Asus Transformer prime with a docking station that can boost battery especially on the W510 (18 hours worth) and up to 8 hours on the W710 which is better than the new Ipad. The W510 is an ARM based tablet  Medfield based x86 tablet at 10.1 inches and a 1366 x 768 Super IPS screen, docking keyboard, SIM card slot, hdmi port, USB port all that kind of stuff with a proposed price tag of $599 - $799 and Windows 8 thankfully since Acer has stated that they want a chip that provides more speed than the current ARM chips like the Snapdragon or Tegra 3. I think this is an excellent deal and would really consider buying this over a traditional laptop. The Acer W710 is the "desktop replacement" and features a dock (no keyboard) that has 3 USB ports and no battery but is great if you want to plug in a keyboard use a wireless mouse, a larger 11.6 inch screen with a 1920 x 1080 capacitive 10 finger full HD screen, aluminum body chassis is a nice touch even if it might affect wifi a bit, a rear 5mp auto focus camera is a great touch and is about equal to the "isight" camera on the Ipad, and Dolby Digital Home Theater is real nice especially since Windows has a Virtual Surround Sound option if you dig deep enough in your sound card settings. The W710 is my favorite by far and is probably the better buy unless you are looking for 3G coverage via SIM slot and need a docking keyboard. Check out the videos done by the Verge 
 

ASUS Transformer AiO official allinone PC dual boots Android and Windows 8

      This is the Asus AIO (all in one) which is 18.4 inches and features a nice touchscreen and at first thought was being able to dual boot into Android and Windows but actually Asus called on Bluestacks and has a rooted form of ICS 4.0.3 with a toggle to go back and forth from Windows and "Android." Not much else except you can detach the screen much similar to the Acer model and use it as a 18 inch tablet which is only slightly more practical. Imagine going to work with that under your arm!!  ASUS outs Tablet 600, a Transformerlike Slate running Windows RT

     Next up is the Asus 600 and 810 "transformer books'' which are really nice looking Windows 8 running Transformer tablets. Some of the main differences are of course one running Windows RT and one running Windows 8, the RT version is based on the Nvidia Tegra 3 quad core chip which is an excellent choice especially the embedded graphics but has 2 GB of RAM instead of 1 GB so it can run Windows 8, also the screen on the ARM model 600 is of a lower Super IPS ++ 1366 x 768 instead of the 1920 x 768 and the Transformer Pad Infinity is supposed to be of an even higher resolution in the ongoing pixel war between the new Ipad and her competitiors. Mainly the specs are the same both sporting 8mp rear auto focusing cameras and a 2mp up front for HD video chatting. The Intel device runs on the Medfield chip and has an active digitizer layer which allows you to use a pen which is a whole lot more accurate than a regular stylus.





Skypad Protos Out Update: Gemini Up for sale

Amazon.com: SKYTEX Technology Inc. Skypad SX-SP970A 9.7-Inch Tablet (Black): Electronics


Okay so I was a bit excited in my haste to post this that I only included a link and now am featuring the specs added by Skytex and the Gemini is available to be bought for $169 which is very shocking (not to be confused with the Skypad Alpha 2 on the official Skytex website for $169. The Skypad Protos is not available for sale or pre-order currently and is featuring the same specs as said on the website except this time around (per my suggestion) they have included a 5mp rear camera that should make this all the more IpadHD competitor. Some people have scoffed saying that this can not possible be the real thing but according to the model numbers on the Gemini and Protos we have enough information to believe this is the real deal and are waiting on a statement from Skytex. Also the specs on the Gemini deviated from what we were lead to believe: first instead of Bluetooth 4.0 it is listed as 2.0, second it says it has a full USB 2.0 port on the tablet which is hard to believe for a budget Android tab, third which really are just questions I have are that is says it has a mini HDMI 1.4 and optimized Wi- Fi which means usually it is going to be a hard plastic backing or it will feature an aluminum backing with two wi-fi radios instead of one.
Update: We have word from a company spokesperson that the Gemini and Protos will be up for order next week!
We do have the Protos and Gemini as pre-orders on our site but shipments are not expected to go out until the 2nd week of July
 Gemini will be available for puchase next week.

These are two of the statements made to us. Sadly no word about the Protos.
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