News Bits: Acer 5100 Turion X2 Notebook Released, Dell Pricing Changes, Intel Core 2 Duo Dates

Acer unveils 15.4" AMD Turion X2 Aspire 5100 series

Acer announced the new Aspire 5100 series, a family of multimedia notebooks with cutting-edge performance and entertainment features. The 5100 series is based on AMD's Turion X2 Mobile Technology, designed for a 64-bit future. It has up to a 160GB Serial ATA hard drive, DVD super-multi drive (upon availability, an HD-DVD drive), and a 5-in-1 media reader.

Graphics power is provided by ATI's Radeon Xpress 1100 (128MB dedicated GDDR2, up to 384MB shared HyperMemory for total of 512MB). It drives a 15.4" WXGA widescreen display with Acer's CrystalBrite glossy screen technology. Other features of the Aspire 5100 series include a DVI-D port, Acer QuickCharge (improves battery longevity and shortens re-charge time by charging battery to 80% capacity in just one hour), 4x USB 2.0, and Gigabit Ethernet.

Pricing: the Acer Aspire 5100 series starts at $899, available through retailers across North America.

Press Release

Dell to announce pricing changes

On Thursday, July 13th, Dell plans to announce pricing changes for US Small Business and Home Office PCs. The move is expected to shift Dell away from promoting inexpensive, barebones computers, toward more mainstream configurations with an elevated pricetag. Dell did not give details on which systems would be affected.

A Dell company spokesman said, "It will pertain to how we can create better value for customers who opt to buy products and services from us." An Analyst stated the move is a reaction to customer complaints about prices.

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Firefox gains more market share

According to research by OneStat.com, Mozilla's Firefox web browser has been slowly hacking away at Internet Explorer's web dominance. The latest statistics place Firefox's share of the global market at 12.93%, with Internet Explorer at 83.05%. Since May, Firefox has gained 1.14%. In the U.S., Firefox's popularity is even higher, at 15.82%, with IE at 79.78%.

It's not only popular in the U.S. - Firefox holds a market share in Italy, Australia, and Germany of 20.41%, 24.23%, and 39.02% respectively. The Mozilla Foundation is preparing for Microsoft's updated Internet Explorer with its own Firefox 2.0, which adds numerous small improvements to the current version.

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Intel Core 2 Duo Ramp up and Release Dates Set

Intel will be having a shin dig at its headquarters on July 27th of this month where they will release the Core 2 Duo for desktop machines (code named Conroe).  At the same time they will officially confirm dates for the Core 2 Duo for laptops that will hit the market in August.  Major manufacturing partners of Intel will be on hand at the event at the end of July, at the same time Intel will also release information on some of its company restructuring.

Intel has instructed benchmark review sites to publish benchmarks for the Core 2 Duo on July 13th so expect to see benchmarking websites to start publishing their results soon.

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95 AMD products reach end of line

AMD is ditching many of its processors based on socket 754 and 939 for ones based on the new socket AM2.

In addition to seeing some socket 754 Sempron processors discontinued, the AMD Turion ML-32, ML-34, ML-37, ML-40, ML-42, and ML-44 have also been discontinued in favor of newer Socket S1 parts. The MT-32, MT-34, MT-37, and MT-40 are also on their way out.

More info on discontinued processors can be found here

First-tier notebook shipments to miss 2006 targets

DigiTimes is reporting that first-tier Taiwan notebook manufacturers are expected to see notebook shipments in 2006 fall short of their targets by five to ten percent, mainly due to slower than expected shipments in the first half of this year. Quanta Computer shipped 8.7 million notebooks in 1H 2006, short of its 9.6 million target. Compal also fell short, shipping 5.44 million units while expecting 6.

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