Acer Very Pleased With Itself

Author	Benny Har-Even
Published	7th Apr 2006

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At the end of a press conference held yesterday by Acer, a fellow journalist informed me that it's been statistically proven that after 40 minutes of listening most people lose concentration. A shame then that Acer chose to precede its presentation of its range of new products with over an hour of facts and figures on how the company is doing. This could more precisely have been précised as – “we’re doing pretty well folks” – now here are our new products.

Having sat through all of it I feel duty bound to pass at least some of it on so here goes. In the EMEA (Europe, Middle-East, Africa) region, Acer is number one overall in notebooks and number three in PC desktops and has seen growth of 40 per cent over the past year. That’s not bad going, considering that in 2001 it was an unknown as a brand. In fact, its brand is growing far in excess of the rest of the market.

In our reviews Acer products have consistently done well on features and price and this approach seems to be paying off. Its brand doesn’t have as much cache as a Sony, but it sells a heck of a lot more notebooks. What’s interesting is the degree to which it predicts that notebooks will become almost as popular as desktops as they become increasingly popular choices for digital entertainment and for gaming.

Acer is keen to stress that it is a multi-talented company and doesn’t just produce PCs and notebooks. We’ve seen some competitive displays from it, as well as PDAs and I’ve even got a dedicated in-car GPS device waiting in the wings to be tested.

So onto the products. Starting with notebooks, Acer was very proud that it would be first to ship a notebook featuring integrated 3G – as featured on the TravelMate 4260 aimed at business and the Aspire 5650 aimed at consumers, which Gordon actually reported on back in January.

Product Manger James Harvey also brought out a first look at a new lightweight widescreen core-duo TravelMate 3020, featuring Acer’s ‘OrbiCam’ built-in camera with face tracking technology. This one was decked out in white with a pearly white keyboard that reminded me of early iBooks. Looks like it could be a winner on the style front as well as price.