Cool Laptop

Left: Acer Aspire 721 / Right: Acer Aspire 521 

Let’s be honest. The Acer Aspire 521 doesn’t look all that different from most other 10 inch netbooks Acer has released so far this year. What’s different about this model is that it’s one of the first with an AMD processor and chipset instead of Intel components. But you wouldn’t really know that to look at the laptop.

That said, it’s always a bit of fun to check out one of the first unboxing videos, so after the break for your viewing pleasure is an unboxing vid courtesy of nDevil.

For reference, the Acer Aspire 521 has a 1.7GHz AMD Athlon 2 Neo K125 processor and ATI Radeon HD 4225 graphics. It supports DDR3 memory, and has two RAM slots, which means you can install up to 4GB of memory on this model.

I got a brief look at this netbook, as well as its larger cousin the Acer Aspire 721 with an 11.6 inch display the other night, and the build quality really does look excellent. I’ll be curious to see how these machine stack up against similar models with Intel Atom or Intel CULV processors in terms of performance.

Open source media player VLC is known as a Swiss Army knife of video players. It can handle pretty much any DRM-free video format you can throw at it, from WMV to MKV, with a little H.264, Xvid and DiVX thrown in for good measure. The folks behind VLC just rolled out version 1.1 with support for Google’s new WebM format. But that’s not the only trick up its sleeve. VLC 1.1 also supports hardware video accleration.

What that means is that if you have supported hardware, VLC will use the GPU to accelerate video playback, thus reducing the CPU load significantly.

In order to take advantage of the new hardware acceleration you’re going to need a machine with an NVIDIA graphics processor, so if you’ve got an NVIDIA ION-powered device you should be good to go. If you’ve got integrated Intel graphics or an ATI graphics processor, you might have to wait a while. ATI support should come after the company updates its drivers, and Intel support should come after the VLC team gets to spend some time with Intel hardware that supports GPU decoding — although I suspect that won’t include Intel Atom chips with integrated graphics.

GPU acceleration is also limited to the Windows Vista, Windows 7, and Linux versions of VLC 1.1.

For a complete list of new features in VLC 1.1, check out the VLC home page. The team has also added support for new audio and video codecs, as well as a new framework that will allow coders to write extensions for VLC.

The original OLPC XO Laptop sparked the netbook revolution by showing that laptops could be tiny, cheap, and still pretty useful. But the laptop also broke the mold in a few other ways, by using a spill and dust resistant membrane keyboard, a durable plastic frame, and an innovative user interface called Sugar OS. While Sugar was designed to make the laptop easy for students in developing nations who have never touched a computer before to use… it’s not exactly what most people see when they turn on a computer. So if you want to teach a kid to use spreadsheet apps or other office or productivity software used in most of the world, then it might not be the best way to go.

Now it looks like the folks at OLPC have gotten the message, because they’re shipping the XO 1.5 laptop with the option to switch between the Sugar OS and a full GNOME Desktop, which provides a user interface closer to what you’d see on a Linux distribution like Ubuntu, or on Windows or OS X, for that matter. It has taskbars, and a start menu, even if that’s not what they’re called.

Students already using the original XO laptop will also be able to use the new software.

OLPC also says that a new XO-HS laptop with a more traditional keyboard will be available later this year.

Toshiba is giving its 10 inch netbooks a slight spec bump today, by introducing models with support for DDR3 memory.

First up is a new version of the Toshiba NB305, which has a new 1.66GHz Intel Atom N455 processor and 1GB of DDR3 memory. Like its predecessors, this mini-laptop comes with Windows 7 Starter Edition, a 250GB hard drive, 802.11b/g/n WiFi, and a 6 cell battery.

Toshiba has also introduced a lower priced model called the Toshiba Mini NB255. It’s built of less expensive plastic and has a different keyboard design than the NB305. But it features the same basic guts including an Atom N455 CPU and DDR3 memory.

Both netbooks have 10.1 inch, 1024 x 600 pixel displays. The new Toshiba NB305 will sell for $379, while the Toshiba NB255 will run just $299.

Fujitsu is making a few tweaks to its ultraportable notebook lineup. The company is introducing a minor update for its Fujitsu MH380 ten inch netbook, with new models coming with 1.66GHz Intel Atom N455 or 1.83GHz Intel Atom N4705 processors, both of which support DDR3 memory.

Fujitsu is also introducing a new line of 11.6 inch laptops. The Fujitsu LifeBook PH520 will feature a 1.7GHz AMD Athlon Neo K1235 processor and ATI Radeon HD 4225 graphics, while the LifeBook PH540 will offer a 1.2GHz Intel Celeron SU2300 ULV processor instead.

It looks like the new 11.6 inch laptops will ship in Japan with Windows 7 Home Premium and 1366 x 768 pixel displays. It’s not clear whether these models will be offered outside of Japan anytime soon.