Acer: 'We will be the last man standing in the PC industry'

Acer's Jason Chen will give you Win10 for free

Game play

The last of Acer’s new notebooks was the ruggedised Chromebook CB3-531 with a 15.6in display, 16GB storage and Intel Celeron dual-core N2830 processor, all weighing around 2kg. Turning its back on the industry trend to sacrifice hardware connectivity for form factor, this Chromebook still comes with USB 2 and USB 3 ports, an HDMI socket and SD card slot. The product will cost a thoroughly reasonable €249 / $199, in Europe from June and North America in July.

Acer’s Chromebook CB3-531 aims for a corporate look and is built with reinforced corners to protect it from occasional mishaps

In fact, Acer has made a conscious decision to keep the faith with hardware ports. It remains company policy to keep providing 10/100/1000 Ethernet ports on all its business Windows notebooks, we note.

Take the next bend: The XR341CKA gaming monitor has a curved screen (so you can sit even closer)

For the gaming sector, Acer presented a new 34in 21:9 ultra wide monitor offering 3440x1440-pixel resolution, memorably named the XR341CKA. Its unique feature is being curved on the horizontal axis in a concave fashion, supposedly giving a more immersive experience for the serious gamer. It will cost a not-inconsiderable €1,399 / $1,299, reaching European shores in August and North America in September.

Also on show were Acer’s other gaming displays, including the IPS-based XB270HU, which came out earlier this year. To our eyes, it looked as sharp as a scalpel while running full-res animated sequences.

The XB270HU produces cracking live-motion images in extraordinary detail

For other gaming hardware, however, Acer was restricted to promises. There will be a new Predator gaming “desktop” PC – albeit one so large and hideous that you’ll definitely want to keep it on the floor – but not until Q3 this year. A similarly huge and ghastly looking Predator notebook, a preproduction model of which was flashed briefly during the keynote but not put on demonstration, should arrive in Q4. It is, as we were told many times, “awesome”, although much of the bulk of this gaming notebook looked as if it might be the cooling system.

Looking like Maximilian from The Black Hole, the promised Predator desktop gaming PC could have done a lot worse by looking like Old Bob

PIC: [predator-desktop.jpg] CAPTION: Looking like Maximilian from The Black Hole, the promised Predator desktop gaming PC could have done a lot worse by looking like Old Bob

Yet another tease flashed from the stage was a Predator gaming tablet, built to include four speakers and provide haptic feedback. No price was given, nor any idea of what games might be available to take best advantage of whatever a Predator gaming tablet does better than other tablets. It should become available in Q3.

The company’s shiny little Revo One could easily be mistaken for a NAS drive but is a fully fledged PC with two 2.5-inch drive bays. It has been given a software upgrade to support its emerging cloud platform, Acer Open C+C 3.0.

Acer's Revo One has an Intel Celeron CPU with Core i-series models to follow

According to Acer, the whole IoT market was going nowhere fast other than in the minds of futurists, so it released this platform to encourage more developers to get involved in something Acer calls BYOC: Build Your Own Cloud. So far, Intel, MediaTek, RealTek and several others are looking at putting it into chipsets for IoT devices.

Still at the planning stage is a device called abTouchPhone, a prototype of which was sealed in a plastic box to stop us from touching it or phoning with it. Acer reckons there could be a demand for a desktop office (or even domestic) phone with a large touch-screen display and video conferencing support. In the past, many have tried this kind of thing – even Amstrad – but all have failed. Perhaps Acer will come to market at the right time. We wish them luck.

Still at prototype stage, the abTouchPhone was on demonstration in hands-off mode

Needless to say, Acer also has a portfolio of tablets, mobile and wearable devices and more on these shortly. ®