IT‘S NO BIG surprise that Acer is one of AMD’s Brazos partners, but at least one of its products have made an appearance on the web ahead of the January launch. It’s not going to blow anyone’s mind when it comes to performance, especially as Acer has gone for a dual core Ontario CPU, but the upside should be decent battery life.
The Aspire One 522 was leaked by Macles, a site famous for its early and more importantly, accurate Acer leaks. In terms of hardware, the AO522 isn’t exactly what you’d call impressive, but it’s worth remembering that this is a netbook competitor and it seems to be just that. For starters it has a dual core 1GHz AMD C-50 processor with a TDP of 9W and Radeon HD 6250 graphics with UVD3 support and for what it’s worth, DX11 compatible graphics.
The AO522 has a 10.1-inch display, the same as just about every netbook out there, but it one ups most netbooks by offering 1280×720 resolution and although this isn’t as good as some 10.1-inch screens that manages as much as 1366×768 pixels, it’s far superior to the usual 1024×600/576 10.1-inch screens. It looks as if Acer could’ve managed to squeeze in an 11.6-inch screen, as the screen bezel looks very thick in the pictures and this does somewhat detract from the overall design of the AO522.
Port wise the AO522 has three USB 2.0 ports, a D-sub connector, an HDMI port, an Ethernet port, a pair of audio jacks and a memory card reader. It has one of Acer’s typical keyboards which is of the “floating island” type and it appears to have a slightly larger trackpad than most netbooks, but it’s not huge. There’s a webcam visible in the bezel above the screen and although there’s no mention of wireless features, we’d presume Acer has at least added 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi support.
The battery is said to be good for up to 6 hours of usage, strangely enough this is worse than Acer’s AO521 with a 9W TPS single core 1.2GHz AMD V105 processor and the M880G chipset. Then again, the battery capacity isn’t known at this point in time and it’s possible the Acer will offer higher capacity batteries for the AO522. None of the pictures posted give a clear indication as to what size battery Acer supplies as standard, but we’d be surprised if it was anything but a 6-cell battery. Finally there’s no word on pricing, so we’re going to have to wait until Acer decides to launch the AO522 to find out what is possible the most vital aspect of the Brazos platforms success or not, which will most likely happen at CES.S|A
Lars-Göran Nilsson
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