It’s new gadget week! Acer is one of the first out of the gate, with a bunch of tech on show at the Computex 2015 expo starting today in Taiwan — and some of it looks pretty cool. Hurry up and bring it to Australia, guys.
Here’s a cross-section of the tech that Acer is introducing at Computex this year. At the moment there’s no Australian pricing or availability, but we’ll let you know as soon as we find out.
The Acer Aspire Switch 11 V is a 2-in-1 convertible tablet in the vein of the original Switch 11 (and the Switch 10, which we liked), but it’s a compete redesign — using Acer’s improved Snap Hinge 2, a new aluminium chassis and extra low-power computing grunt courtesy of a new Intel Core M processor. Acer promises eight hours of battery life from the 11.6-inch-display notebook, and there’s also an even smaller 10-inch version with an Atom processor coming later this year.
There are three new Acer Liquid Leap wearables on show at Computex; the Leap Active “for socially active young-minded consumers”, the Leap Fit for “health-conscious consumers”, and the Leap Curve “with a unique curved screen”. It looks like the Active measures both daytime activity and sleep, as well as showing notifications, while the Fit has an integrated heart rate monitor, and the Curve fits a 1.4-inch curved touch screen into a metal frame.
The Chromebox CXI2 is a refresh of the original Acer ChromeBox, and here’s how it has changed: new Intel Core i3 and Celeron processors, Intel HD Graphics, a 16GB SSD, up to 8GB of dual-channel DDR3 1600MHz memory, 802.11ac Wi-Fi and Gigabit Ethernet, all coming together and “delivering performance to meet even the most demanding Chrome OS needs” according to Acer.
Two new budget Android tablets are coming too, the Iconia One 8 (B1-830) and Iconia One 7 (B1-760HD) — shipping with MediaTek octa-core processors (rather than Intel’s Atom, as the previous Iconia One 8 did), Android 5.1 Lollipop, and both pre-loaded with Acer’s Iconia Suite of productivity and entertainment apps.