Articles about Acer

As officials from all three major companies involved confirmed to the press during the overnight hours in North America, global #3 PC manufacturer Acer has reached an agreement to acquire Gateway, America's #3 manufacturer, for $710 million.

And in a possibly contingent move, Gateway will use some of that immediate cash infusion to exercise its right to preclude Lenovo from acquiring Packard Bell from California investor Lap Shun Hui, who purchased it from NEC just last year.

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In an interview with Financial Times Deutschland, the president of global #3 PC manufacturer Acer once again conveyed his overall disappointment with the lack of contribution he believes Microsoft's Windows Vista provides to PC sales. Though Gianfranco Lanci's comments were only briefly excerpted, for the first time, Lanci purported to speak not just for Acer but for his competitors as well, telling the paper, "Die gesamte Industrie ist enttäuscht über Windows Vista." ("The entire industry is disappointed with Windows Vista.")

Most likely, Lanci's comments were in Italian and translated into German. But a summary of his explanation by FTD points to two factors, the second being what he characterized as Vista's relative instability and lack of maturity. Lanci and other manufacturers had apparently hoped for a surge in sales comparable to what Windows XP and its predecessors provided.

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Acer is showing strength in the global PC industry, becoming the world's third largest PC maker in the first quarter of 2007, according to data from research firm iSuppli.

The Taiwanese company posted a 42.7 percent increase in shipments over the same quarter last year. That was enough for Acer to take the third spot from rival Lenovo. The Chinese PC manufacturer still leads in desktop PC shipments, but Acer's widening lead in notebooks gave it the number 3 spot overall.

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Thought Sony's battery recall woes were over? Think again. Acer has announced a voluntary recall of 27,000 batteries made by the company over short-circuiting and fire concerns.

According to the US Consumer Product Safety Commission and Acer, 16 reports of overheating batteries have already been received, though none of them were in Acer laptops themselves. The recall affects batteries within TravelMate PCs produced between May 2004 and September 2006.

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A patent granted in 1994 to Compaq for an adaptation of its 16-bit EISA system bus architecture -- which Compaq co-created, but which was already becoming outmoded by 1994 -- is among four patents amended last Thursday to Hewlett-Packard's list of alleged infringement subjects, in its ongoing patent battle against oncoming competitor Acer.

Patent #5,353,415, for "Method and apparatus for concurrency of bus operations," explains how a computer's cache interface logic can be used to make posting cycles that would normally wait for one another in sequence, make room for one another in alternating concurrency. The technology is an outgrowth of Compaq's early work in pioneering the first 16-bit expansion busses.

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Perhaps sensing an oncoming attack from the world's new #4 PC manufacturer, Acer, HP reached deep into its patent portfolio yesterday, uncovering five technology methods - including three acquired from Compaq - and filed a lawsuit accusing Acer of utilizing HP technologies covered by those patents without authorization. The suit seeks unspecified monetary damages, but more importantly, it requests that a judge block the sale of Acer computers utilizing those technologies, imported from Taiwan.

That could quite possibly include all of Acer's notebook line, since the technology addressed by two of the listed patents (one granted to Compaq pre-merger, one to HP post-merger) concerns processor speed reduction - the capability for a computer to instruct its processor to power down in periods of reduced stress or workload.

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In an interview published last week by the British publication PC Pro Acer Senior Vice President James Wong complained that Microsoft -- a company with which Acer has, at least on paper, partnered -- is actively scheming to force computer users to invest in more expensive PCs, in order to take advantage of the more feature-rich tier of its upcoming operating system, Windows Vista Home Premium.

"The new experience you hear of, if you get [Vista Home] Basic, you won't feel it at all," Wong reportedly stated, adding that the company is actually actively undermining its own lower tier in an effort to persuade customers to move up the value chain.

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