The Future of Acer Aspire Ones (Ion Anyone?)

Acer Aspire One 10-inch Could there be a future Acer Aspire One powered by NVIDIA’s Ion Platform? We hope so, and Acer has certainly made it clear they are interested in it.

Another important piece of news is that the original 8.9″ Acer Aspire One will continue on, and both models will still be sold and even refreshed as time goes on. They are also dropping the price on the 8.9″ down to $299 (not sure when this will take affect, probably within a few weeks of the 10″ D150 release date)

Netbooks have done much better than Acer imagined they would do (from the interview):

Acer became the leading manufacturer of netbooks in the fourth quarter of 2008. Have you been surprised at how the market has taken off?

Our expectations were that netbooks would be 4 or 5 percent of the notebook computing business, but if you look at the NPD data it is now at 12 percent and it’s trending to towards 15 to the high teens in terms of the share. Netbooks are going to only expand now, especially as they become always connected, and closer to a smart phone device with embedded 3G.

Some notes from the interview:
– Acer will be doing more bundled integrations with mobile broadband, similar to the Radio Shack bundle.
– Acer will be using Intel’s CULV platform in larger laptops/notebook
– Acer plans on low-cost notebooks in the 13″ – 15.6″ range with ultra-low voltage (ULV) CPUs.

Interestingly enough, they addressed things they would have changed with the original 8.9″ Aspire One. Battery life and wireless connectivity were very important, as was placement of the mouse buttons (which have been moved under the touchpad/trackpad in the 10″ version).

Read: LAPTOP Magazine