Acer announced earlier today a new line of portable computers from their Aspire V5 and V3 line and their smallest (and lightest) entry is one part of the V5 batch, namely a 11.6 inch mini laptop (call it netbook if you will).
The little fellow will either come with a Celeron or a Pentium processor, so don’t expect a low-power Intel Atom Cedar Trail or even AMD Fusion chip on it.
Also, there’s no dedicated video card, but this V5 junior is not about graphics, but physique, as it’s only 0.6 inches thin, being slimmer than your usual ultrabook. Still, you’re some way off that standard, of course, considering you don’t get a Core iX series processor or an SSD, but if portability is your thing, this fragile machine will blend right in.
There’s not much info about the full specs of this V5 netbook, but it should start shipping sometime in Q2 of 2012, for a starting price of 399 euros/525 bucks. The other entries in the V5 series will be bigger, namely 14 and 15 inches, and will come with Sandy Bridge hardware and dedicated Nvidia Gforce GT video cards, and will have a starting price of around 620 bucks, so getting near to the ultrabook psychological price point.
The 11.6 inch V5 looks pretty good, but might be pretty slow as well
If you ask me, the larger models try to mimic in terms of look Apple computers and in terms of size ultrabooks, so they might strike a chord with users that don’t want to spend over a grand for a laptop, but are rather more after the experience of having a good looking, size XS computer. As for the V3 laptops, this will address mainstream users as well and will have screens ranging from 14 to 17.1 inches, thus being more appropriate for those that intend to use their laptop as a full blown work station.
Going back to this (still) mysterious 11.6 inch V5 entry, we can’t but link it with other fresh of the bus 11.6 inchers of this interval, namely Asus’s 1225B and 1225C. The two laptops, running on Cedar Trail and Fusion platforms, were already reviewed here at tlbhd.com, but failed to completely impress, thus the competition (and alternative) represented by the Aspire V5 netbook is more than welcomed.
Photo: www.liliputing.com
