(Source: Fujitsu)

Trolling through Acer’s recent laptop offerings, I was particularly fixated by those with massive storage space. In particular, the Acer Aspire 7720 and 9920 got my attention, each with two 160GB hard disk drives.

But with 320GB HDDs already set to ship in the 4th quarter of this year (Toshiba’s MK52GSX) or at latest Q1 2008 (Fujitsu’s MHZ2 BH), one wonders how far (or rather how big) we’re going to get in 6 months time. Is a 2x 320GB = 640GB configuration realistic heat-wise (since other technical issues seem entirely solvable)? Anyone with enough tech-smarts to give us any input on this?

(Source: ModusLink)

Normally, news like this wouldn’t merit a post here, even if Acer PCs were being bundled with these Windows Vista “Express Upgrades” late last year. But being in the UK, and seeing the problem first-hand (ok, second-hand given that some of my friends were the victims) made ModusLink’s (and by extension, Microsoft’s) farce unforgivable.

Considering that Vista was released at the end of January, how “Express” is it if some UK customers (who made their orders in November last year) are only getting their Vista upgrades now (in April!)?

Read more about this at Channel Register.

For yet another month, Acer saw an increase in consolidated revenues - now up 5.6% on year to NT$43.5 billion. This is 2.1% higher than last month’s figures (NT$42.9 billion), and is in fact a new record high.

With the Christmas season looming up, there’s certainly a lot of potential for further gains. So, will we see even more progress from Acer come 2007?

[News via Digitimes]

(Source: Yahoo!)

While Dell plays the love-love game with Google, Acer has decided to play catch-up with a recently announced multi-year partnership with Yahoo!.

The deal starts with a co-branded toolbar and start page (based on the Yahoo! personalised home page, of course), which will be preloaded on all Acer PCs worldwide starting from 1st October, 2006. Localised versions will be developed for many countries as well.

(Source: Stuff Magazine)

Well, this might not be an Acer product, but it can be used with an Acer notebook. That’s a good enough reason for us to feature this nifty Bluetooth remote control which can be slotted into your notebook’s ExpressCard slot.

But then, you probably won’t understand our fascination with the Interlink Electronics VP6600 ExpressCard Media Remote until you read Stuff Mag’s feature of the device. Of course, since they did mix our fav Acer Ferrari notebook with their uhmm… analysis, we could just be biased.

(Source: NotebookReview.com)

On NotebookReview.com’s list last month, the Acer Aspire 5672 was the 10th most popular notebook. This month, it’s climbed to 6th place, with the newly inducted Aspire 5102 at No. 8.

This makes it two for Acer, the highest number from a single manufacturer (along with Dell and Toshiba).

Oh yes, the Top 3 on the list are still the Toshiba Satellite A105, the Dell Inspiron e1505, and the Sony VAIO SZ - though the VAIO SZ has lost its 2nd placing to the Inspiron e1505.

Read more news and reviews on the Acer Aspire 5102WLMi notebook.

In Greenpeace’s first Guide to Greener Electronics, Acer was ranked 12th out of the 14 top mobile and PC producers worldwide. The scorecard ranks companies on their use of environmentally harmful chemicals and electronic waste recycling, so it normally wouldn’t be surprising for an Asian-based producer like Acer to score so badly.

But even LG Electronics - a Taiwan-based company like Acer - ranked 7th on the list, while five other Asian companies were ranked within the Top 10, indicating that Acer has quite a lot of work to do playing catch up.

All 14 companies, however, failed to reach the necessary standards for a “green” ranking.

[News via WebWire]

(Source: MP3 Newswire)

As the latest addition to Acer’s media player stable, the MP-340 comes in with a 1.8″ TFT display (smaller than its bigger sibling’s 3.5″ screen), with the capability to tackle MP3/WMA audio formats, plus the JPEG image format and H.264 video. According to early news releases, it doesn’t support the staple AVI format nor DRM-type codecs.

Storage-wise, it comes with a 20GB hard drive, plus an SD-card slot. Dimensions-wise, we’ll be looking at 3.7″ x 2.5″ x 0.8″. And if Acer’s claims are to be believed, the MP-340 lasts 10 hours on a single charge (with the display off).

P.S.: It’ll come with Sudoku in-built too, and is apparently being sold in Germany already (for US$280 to $318).

[News via MP3 Newswire]