News Acer to launch HD-ready Aspire One

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/hardware/2009/05/19/acer-to-launch-hd-ready-aspire-one/1

Acer is set to launch an Aspire One netbook with a multimedia co-processor and 1280x720 screen capable of playing high definition media.

 

They kind of killed it with the funky media drive, but the rest seems pretty cool.

 

Don't you mean Acer?

And I agree with proxess, why the weird format? UMD failed, MiniDisc failed even though they're not that bad. MD even was/is superior to other comparable formats!

Will people ever learn? :roll:

 

Sorry, but if it's not 1080, then it's not HD in my opinion.

 

heh, Vmedia drive has FAIL written all over it.

 

What is 720p then? MiniHD?

 

Can you imagine using a 10" at 1920 x 1080 you wouldn't be able to read a word on the screen.

 

I like the idea, but there are a few issues. As other people have said, what is the deal with the silly optical drive? especially as it is read only? I wouldn't buy a disk that I could only play on my netbook. It might have a chance if you could buy a Blu Ray disk, then convert it to the mini thingywhatsit but I can't see that happening.

And why didn't they just use Ion? That could have done all they wanted and more and wouldn't require a weird funky extra chip that will probably lack drivers in some scenarios.

 

Intel would probably have charged them more for their Atom CPUs if they'd used nVidia Ion. This way they get Atom cheaply as part of the regular Intel platform, but add an extra, cheap chip for multimedia.

 

what? the acer one already does 720p playback.. just a resolution change to native 720p looks like.. it's 1080 is what it gets choppy with- and youtube's flash hd, it averages around 3fps.. youtube hq plays fine

I tested 720p when we got ours.. and if you really want 1080p playback (no point on 1024x600) but you can take out the mini pci wireless card and put in a decoder.. use usb for the wireless.. I don't see why they need the extra hardware to decode that

 

The mini disc thing is just silly, especially when sd cards are so cheap these days. I can't see a 1gb sd card being much more expensive than one of these discs, and they're more durable and most things already have a sd card reader. Also, my eee pc 1000he is capable of playing 720p h264 video already (albeit only displaying at 1024x600), and without any coprocessor.