After being the center of attraction for media, users, Windows enthusiasts and others, Windows 8 will finally be out this year and with this curiosity to know what tablet manufacturing companies will have their names added with it has also increased among all!

So, any idea which companies will be tagged as Windows 8 tablet makers once the new Windows hit the market this year? Well, there are number of popular manufacturers that will get to included in the long list of tablet manufacturing companies, some of these are HP, Dell, Lenovo, Acer and Asus which will come up with their Windows 8 tablet sometimes in October this year.

The other names that came into limelight for working on their own set of Windows 8 tablet to be introduced in the earliest possible part of 2013 happen to be Sony, Toshiba, Samsung, and Lenovo.

Well, as far as Dell is concerned, it has been keeping quiet about its plans for coming up with its tablet. It did launch the Dell Streak 10 tablet based on Android Honeycomb last year but it kind of kissed goodbye to it soon.

There’s a somewhat similar story about HP. It did land up into tablet market but couldn’t taste much success with its HP TouchPad which did gain popularity but it couldn’t last that long.

Interestingly, both the companies got ready to try out their luck in the tablet market once again with Windows 8 tablets.

It appears that the magic of Netbooks is coming to an end and has lost the kind of power it had earlier.  At least from the move taken by Lenovo, one gets this notion. Lenovo has stopped selling netbooks online, so if you had any online buying plans, you’ll have look for some other place to look for as Lenovo’s website is no more the place for you.  And the company hasn’t decided whether it’d starting the sales in the near future.

Lenovo is not the only company to take such a step; many other companies have taken similar decision on seeing consumers being less interested in netbooks over the time. With the availability of more technically strong tablets and mini-laptops at lower price tags, netbooks have seen dramatic drop in the sales. Dell too had stopped selling netbooks sometimes back, and the companies like HP and Acer have reduced their offerings.

Netbooks were a tremendous success but by the second half of the year 2010, their sales started declining, this actually started little by little after April 2010 when Apple’s iPad kindled the tablet market.

The total shipment of netbooks got reduced to 6.3 million in the fourth quarter of last year which was down by 29 percent or can be said to be just the third of what was sold in the fourth quarter a year back.

All the major netbook producing companies observed around 30% drop in the shipments and Lenovo alone found a shipment drop of 43%. However, netbooks are believed to be doing well in some parts of Latin America and Asia.

Right now the Lenovo’s site lists all its netbooks as “temporarily sold out – more stock is expected”.  But interestingly, Lenovo doesn’t seem to be changing its plan of releasing two of its S series netbooks namely S200 and S206 this June, which it announced last month during the CES 2012 in Las Vegas.

Acer is finally entering the “ultrabook” market with its Aspire S3, its first ever ultrabook which claims to be a good featured set at a price below $1000.This 13.3 inch tall, 0.51 inches thin device, weighing 2.98 pounds will be available by this week itself. The body of Aspire S3 is made up of magnesium alloy and you get an Intel Core i5 processor, a solid state drive operating system of 20GB, and the current state of the machine under its hood along with a storage hard drive of 320GB.

A resolution of 1,366 X 768 pixels is offered by the LED-backlit display of the system and it is the integrated Intel HD graphics 3000 graphics processor of its CPU that drives it. Its major specifications include – connectivity options like 802.11 b/g/n Wi-Fi, USB, HDMI ports, 4.0+ HSR, also offers a head phone port and memory card reader. It comes along with a standard RAM of 4GB.

It claims a battery life of 6 hours when used continuously and an extra-ordinary 50 days when left at a standby. There is a special Green Instant On feature that brings the system out of the Sleep mode in mere 2 seconds and out of the Deep Sleep mode (i.e. when it isn’t used for 8 hours) in just 6 seconds. The bottom vents have also been removed and instead the machine has been tweaked for the efficient dissipation of the heat.

The Aspire SE 951 will be available by this week in U.S. and Canada at a suggested price of about $900. Acer also has plans of launching other Ultrabook models which will be offering Core i3 and Core i7 processor options along with larger SSDs; however no release date or pricing related details have yet been announced. If we compare Acer’s Ultrabook with the 13 inch MacBook Air from Apple, it starts at $1,299 and offers a dual-core Intel Core i5 processor of 1.7GHz, flash storage of 128GB, and a standard 4GB RAM.

With the steady coming up of a plethora of tablets, Sony, Acer, and NEC are some of the names that have just come up with fresh announcements. First on the list, Sony is soon to launch its latest consumer slate; it will be a Honeycomb-based Tablet S of 9.4 inches. The boring sounding slate offers those silicon inner parts that are available with most of its Android based competitors, i.e. a dual core Nvidia Tegra 2.

Coming to its hardware parts, you’ll find it offering a “TruBlack” display of 1280X800, front & back mounted cameras, as well as an SD card reader; however, it is notable that some of the reviewers have found that the one can’t play any media from the SD card directly. If anything really makes the Tablet S an interesting and unique device, it is its sloped shape measuring between 0.3 and 0.8 inches, which is believed to be taken from its inspiration from a folded magazine.

While discussing its software, it avails you with a kind of PlayStation emulator that comes along with a custom universal remote app that enables you to control the TVs from Sony, Blu-ray players, and other similar compatible devices. Its battery life is found to be lesser than that of the iPad2 or Galaxy 10.1, by being merely 8.35 hours. The 16GB model will be priced at $499 and the 32GB models will be available for $599 and will be available within a few weeks.

Acer and AT&T will be coming up with a 4G (HSPA+) tablet this year, as they had promised. This Sunday, September the 18^th, the Iconia Tab A501 will be launched in US and will be available in two versions. One will be a 16GB device at a price of $330 when purchased with a contract for two years or at an unsubsidized amount of $500f. The other version will be a 32GB device at $550 sans contract. It is believed that most of its specifications are same as those of the company’s Iconia Tab A500.

On the other hand, NEC has declared that it will be rolling out a 10.1 inch 1280X800 IPS paneled Wintel device offering 1.5GHz Atom and SM35 Express chipset, RAM of 2GB, storage of 64GB, Windows 7 Home Premium, two USB ports, HDMI-out, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi.  The LaVie Touch will be available in Japan for 94,500 Yens which is equivalent to $1,225. It will be accompanied with a DVD drive, a keyboard, and mouse.

Walking the same aisle on which Toshiba and Lenovo are making a move, Acer has finally decided to be a part of the Ultrabook battle at the IFA trade show to be taking place in Berlin. Acer will be officially joining it with its Aspire S3. The chic device offers a display of 13.3 inch or 1366 X768 pixels, thickness of 0.51 inches, uses low voltage Core i3, i5 or i7 Intel processor, on-board flash memory usage for quicker starting up time and caching for performing faster.

It has a neat frame made out of aluminum-magnesium alloy, and a form factor that reminds of MacBook Air line form Apple. Though the specifications aren’t very clear at the moment, it seems apparent that Acer will be offering storage of 240 GB SSD or 500 GB HDD.

The other features of the notebook will be including HDMI port, a pair of 2.0 ports, webcam of 1.3 MP, 2-in-1 SD card reader, a single headset jack, Wi-Fi of 802.11 b/g/n and a Bluetooth of 4.0+HSR.

A full size chiclet keyboard as well as a multi-touch trackpad of slightly large size coming along with mouse buttons will also be offered by the device. Acer even promises 7 hours of battery life for its SSD equipped model making it apparent that the models with hard drive are going to offer lesser battery life.

Acer is looking forward to sell its Aspire S3 in some select regions from a later part of this month at a price of 799 Euros or $1, 138 and moving up to 1, 199 Euros or $1, 707 that will depend on the specifications the buyer will be choosing.

Acer has just come up with a notebook directly targeted to the corporate and the business world ketch upped with cool designing, more power, and portability. Light and slim TravelMate Timeline 8481T has a really less weight of 3.7 pounds, slimmer profile of just 0.87 inch and a display of 14 inch or 1366 X 768 pixels fit fine into a frame that would generally put up a screen of 13.3 inch.

Just the last month, Acer came up with its thin bezel notebook under the name of Gateway brand, this notebook is also proud of its thin screen. This makes experts to believe that both these notebook are based on the LG Shuriken display, a technology that seems to be spreading to many models.

This new system from Acer uses second gen Intel Core i5 processor with integrated graphics to power itself. It offers a RAM of 4 GB but is expandable to 8GB, a SATA hard drive of 320 GB (7200 RPM) which uses Disk Anti-Shock Protection technology.

The numerous features that come packed with the notebook consists of Intel’s Wireless Display or Wi-Di technology, 802.11 b/g/n Wi-Fi, Gigabit Ethernet, Bluetooth, USB 3.0, HD webcam, etc.

It offers a battery life of about 13 hours with the help of 8 cell lithium ion battery when the wireless signal is on; however, it is to be noted that it will vary from person to person on the basis of the computer setting and features chosen and applications opened.

Lot many security features are offered to allure the business users. These include Trusted Platform Module (TPM) 1.2 that encrypts the files and folders, Acer ProShield along with BioProtection Fingerprint protection.

Acer’s TravelMate Timeline 8481T is anticipated to be shipped out from early September at a starting price somewhere around $1,000.

Acer’s Travel Series range of Pico Projectors is going to have a new model out soon, announced Acer. The C110 will be available in the UK by this August and it will cost 199 Pounds. This 50 Ansi lumens projector is light and small with a weight of 175g and measure of 110X85X25mm.

C110 Pico projector is designed in such a way that the people using early technology can hold it well, so if anybody is using a tablet or ultraportable laptop and is in search of some convenient device that can be plugged in to display their presentations to small group of people let’s say friends, colleagues or some business associates.

Acer is targeting this projector basically to the business users and interestingly, the feature that it is busy projecting on its features like portability and instant usability instead of the features like HDMI connectivity.

Acer already has a bit cheaper model for consumer use, i.e. the C20, a 20 Ansi lumens model. It is available for 179 Pounds and it got sold out at really inexpensive rates last year.

One can connect the Acer C110 to any USB device and get anything and everything stored on the system displayed without the need of any external power source. A mini USB cable is offered along with the compact device. It offers single focus wheel and has the ability to beam the slideshow and video footage on to any proper blank wall or projector screen. It produces image of about 25 inches over all. The contrast ratio offered by the display is 1,000 is to 1.

A DLP LED lamp is being used by Acer C110. You won’t find any breakable parts like bulb filaments and again it is mercury free. You don’t need any warming up time as you need in traditional lamps. The LED lamp can be used for 20,000 hours before you think of replacing it. The LED DLP technology used by it is considered an ideal technology to use as it offers better color saturation which is about 60% to 120% more than the traditional lamps as claimed by Acer.

Acer has also brought its C112 “step-up” model in the range of Pico projectors. This model offers 70 Ansi Lumens brightness, LED lamp capable of working for 20,000 hours. It can work both as a powered device that works without the mains as well as the one which works with a battery pack and is placed underneath it. Its size is the same as of the 245g projector. Acer C112 was announced by the end of 2010 and it has already got launched in several places and it is expected to be available in UK by the end of July 2011.

After these new models will be out in the market, Acer will have 5 Pico projectors in its range of projectors, and it is planning to add some 3D models by next year, it will then have 8 Pico projectors in its range. It even sells an iPod adapter for its Pico projectors which offers compatibility with iPad, iPhone and iPods and fits in C112 and C20 well.

Plan to offer 26 inch reflective projector screen with the new Pico models as a part of accessories is also on the cards. It is going to be launched either by the end of August or by the beginning of September, it will be useful in increasing the brightness of the display of the projector by almost double of its original capability.  This screen will be portable and one will be able to fold it to about A4 size.

According to Nick Walter, the business development manager of Acer, they are the third biggest name in the projector market the world over. And in fact, in EMEA it got the second rank, just behind Epson with about 13.8% of the market share. Walter observed that they got to see an increase of 4% share in this particular sector through year on year basis and it is notable that Pico market made the most significant contribution in their growth.

Acer also claims that its Pico projector range will be much liked by the people in the businesses and education segment especially because of the portability and ultra lightness of weight that it offers.

Acer along with Motorola has come up with an upgrade of Android to ‘Honeycomb’ 3.1 for the Iconia tablet PCs in the very start of this week.

From today itself all the Iconia A500 owners will be sent a message telling them about an option that will let them upgrade to Honeycomb 3.1. This upgrading will get improved performance of the system and the USB and Bluetooth devices such as keyboards and mice will also be better supported.

It started up with the Honeycomb 3.1 update last week concurrent with the Wi-Fi-only Xoom tablet’s release.

The other features this update includes support for HTML5 video content, additional video file format, Microsoft Exchange server support also known as Active Sync, and Wi-Fi networking.

David Niu, the product manager of the Acer Computer Australia’s smart hand held devices announced that all the Iconia Tab A500 owner will be sent a notification today itself which will tell them about the update meant for the improvement of the entire user experience.

The latest 3.1 upgrade will prove great for the business users as it makes email accounts management easier; special back up and restoration across the system updates and resets for the proxy and IP address configuration; devices that have emulated storage cards and encrypted primary storage are offered a special encrypted storage and device policy.

Iconia A500 and A100 tablets were launched by Acer in March and were shipped with Google Android Honeycomb 3.0 and now both will be receiving 3.1 update.

A500 comes powered with dual core Nvidia Tegra2 and the offered connectivity is Wi-Fi alone or it is Wi-Fi along with 3G. A HDMI port for 1080p video out is also offered by it.

This week, Acer kept on upgrading its desktop line which was all in the range of mid-tower, small form factor, and all-in-one desktop PC. Each of these desktops is meant to serve different people with different requirement and what adds to their attractiveness is the price at which they are offered i.e. none of them is priced higher than $500.

Starting with Acer M series, it is an impressive looking black colored mid-tower PC based on the expansion crowd but it has left two slots open namely PCIe x1 and CIe x16 for graphics cards which the users can configure and upgrade on their own later on.

It is possible to configure the internal components included in it with an Intel Core i3 or AMD Athlon II x4 quad core processors that can be taken up to 6 GB of RAM, and 1 TB hard drives. And it is also notable that it offers a 3.5 inch hard drive slot which can be opened if more storage space is needed. A SuperMulti DVD drive is also offered with the base model. A convenient tray also comes along with it, which is placed on the top exterior of its chassis and it proves useful for placing any devices that can be charged using any of the nearby USB 2.0 ports. M series starts at $499.99.

Next comes the Acer X series which is a small form-factor desktop. It is basically for the users who don’t have to do much other than Web browsing, video watching and word processing. It has USB ports, audio jacks, and a multi-in-one card reader. You will find a dual core Intel Pentium or AMD Athlon II x4 processor and a RAM of 4 GB fitted internally. The hard drives offered by X Series are either of 500 GB or 1TB, so it is up to you what you choose to have and along with this you also get to make expansion with PCIe x1 and PCIe x16 slot. It even includes an optical drive. The price of X Series starts at $398.

At last comes the T231 H Series of Acer which comes in the all-in-one category of desktops. It offers a 23 inch wide screen that displays in 1,920 by 1,080 HD resolution and is touch-ready. But one needs to note that Acer isn’t offering its own software which you generally get to see in the case of other popular touch all-in-one desktops, for example, HP TouchSmart 610-1065qd and others. Acer seems to be including Microsoft’s Touch Pack. Acer has targeted this desktop to the content consumers and offers DVI, VGA, and HDMI with the desktop and Blu-ray drive with some of the models. The cost of T231 H Series starts at $329.99.

Note – that all the Acer devices described above are Clear.fi which enables them to get connected with other Clear.fi enabled devices of Acer and lets the users to have access to all the multimedia shared within their network say in a office or home or any same building. It can said to be like having a local cloud service of your own!

ASUS, apart from rolling out its new Eee Pad Transformer tablet in India this June, has also declared that it will also introduce an update for Android 3.1 over the air that will start next month. ASUS will announce the nation-wise schedule in June.

The 10.1 inch tablet, Eee Pad transformer can be modified into a netbook by simply attaching it to its keypad dock. Right now, the Transformer is available with Android 3.0 and will be one of the first devices which will be available in its updated version.

Acer Iconia A500 tablet is next on the line to get updated in June. It was rolled out in India hardly a couple of weeks back. Appears strange or not, Acer officials have decided not to open their lips to comment on the upcoming release of the update in the Indian market.

Another tablet which is going to have this update for the Indian market is Motorola Xoom. But it is noteworthy that it is yet to be launched in India. This update is important for the tablet as it can already be bought through many e-commerce websites.

Special improvements in the user interface of Android 3.1, more popularly known as Honeycomb, has been made which will make it work more efficiently with far more speed. Other than this, improvements in the UI transitions all through the system as well as throughout the standard apps have also been made.

The update will prove further beneficial by providing support for several USB based components and accessories like keyboards, mice, digital cameras, game controllers, etc.

A kind of complete revampment of the browser has been done resulting into the support of the web standards like CSS, CSS fixed positioning for all sites, and 3D animation.

Playback support for the embedded HTML5 video content will also result from this. So now it will be possible to save web pages that will include all styling and images for the local offline viewing.