Acer's first 'Pine Trail' netbook: details emerge
Vendor acknowledgement
Acer's first netbook based on Intel's next-gen Atom processor has peered out of the shadows.
The manufacturer has yet to announce the Aspire One 532h, but the machine has been added to the company's support site, albeit with nothing more than a single Bios update, dated 8 December 2009, to show for itself.
Googling the machine's model number calls up a Lithuanian reseller who lists the machine as sporting an Intel Atom N450, integrated GMA 3150 graphics and a 10in, 1280 x 720 LED-backlit display.
The price is quoted as 1138.83 Litas, which is the equivalent of £297/$483/€328 at the current exchange rate.
The N450 is, of course, the first 'Pineview' processor, clocked to 1.66GHz and containing 512KB of L2 cache. It also contains a DDR 2 memory controller and said graphics core which has been moved out of the chipset and into the CPU package.
Pineview's specs are well known, as is its launch date: 10 January 2010.
But it's interesting that the 532h has a 1280 x 720 display, which netbook makers are now allowed to do provided they don't install Windows XP. The 532h will undoubtedly come with Windows 7 Starter Edition. ®
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COMMENTS
Money
Maybe because there's no consumer Linux? The world isn't free from patents and producing a consumer Linux would cost more then simply license a Windows version for them. Canonicals endeavors have failed and they aren't free for a bit. They license proprietary codecs and dvd-players, Dell also surrenders support too (Win OEM requires them to support the damn thing) to Canoncial. There's no gain in offering them without Windows not for the consumer and not for Acer. Extra cost of having more models would be taken from your wallet. Linux is a poor choice anyway if all they do is surf the web and use it for multimedia. Codecs are lacking, hardware acceleration aren't good outside homebrew codecs and adobe flash sucks even more then on windows. Windows is just fine then. So there's no incentive. Of course it would be fun if a OEM started to support a community distribution and contributed to them to make it work smoothly. But OEMs are just interested to sell hardware. Not systems and software. Intel is heavily invested in Moblin though, but that's MID/Netbook size devices.
What? Not GNU/Linux?
Why should I pay for Windows when I know that, were I planning to buy one, I'd be installing Debian testing on it anyway?
D'oh!
Bugger. Just ordered a 751... Sod's law. Ah well, perhaps I'll trade up in a few months.
