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Acer Aspire One 571 emerges: Atom N280, 720p panel and Vmedia drive
Wait a second -- can this be real? Are we seriously seeing a drastic diversion from the cookie-cutter nature that has long since bored us of netbooks? The typically trustworthy macles* has shots and details of an all new Acer Aspire One, one that dyslexic folk will likely confuse with the already shipping Aspire One 751. Indeed, the Aspire One 571 looks an awful lot like other Acer netbooks, but it's the internals that set it apart. For starters, it's rockin' a 1.66GHz Atom N280 processor and a 1,280 x 720 resolution panel; sure it's still just 10.1-inches, but hey, we'll take 720p. Furthermore, there's a Quartics Q1721 Multimedia Processor shoved in there -- you know, so it can handle decoding and encoding of H.264 content while adding hardware scaling and filtering. Eager for more? That Vmedia comeback we heard about is on, as the left palm rest boasts one of the miniature optical drives. Mum's the word on price and availability, but you can peek a few more shots in the read link.
Vmedia not dead yet, wants to bring optical media to netbooks
The last time we heard from Vmedia, the company was on a quixotic journey to bring Minidisc-like optical video disks to cellphones in India -- and while we haven't heard anything on that front since, the company is back with plans to place its tiny 1GB disks inside netbooks, MIDs, and dedicated USB drives. If this just sounds like SanDisk's futile SlotMusic initiative with weirder proprietary hardware and no installed base of readers, congratulations, you can identify terrible business models. Vmedia says that it'll succeed because SD and microSD don't offer consumers a standard set of codecs, while you'll always know a Vmedia drive will play video from a Vmedia disc. Sure, maybe, but we'd bet the industry adopts a few standard video codecs for SD and microSD long before we see a mainstream cellphone or netbook with a clunky mechanical optical drive in it. In fact, hell, let's get crazy: we're willing to bet that UMD will take over as a dominant format before we see a Vmedia drive in a name-brand device. Any takers?
Vmedia's cellphone optical disk system is probably not the next big thing
Seeing as cellphones are usually connected to mobile networks, we'd think the problem of content distribution would basically solve itself, but a company called Vmedia Research is at Mobile World Congress with a new type of optical disk designed just for phones. Using a blue laser, a 1GB, 32mm MiniDisc-esque Vmedia cartridge can hold a full DVD-res movie using H.264 compression, as well as limited special features. Vmedia's demoing the tech on an upcoming Spice GSM handset, which has a 2.8-inch screen and a PSP UMD-like door for inserting the disks. The system is going to debut in India and southeast Asia with 40 Bollywood films available at launch for just $5 each, but Vmedia and Spice say they've got 1,000 more content deals in the works. No plans have been announced for the rest of the world as of yet, but we're not holding our breath. Read - Vmedia press release Read - Spice Movie Phone
