NEW TECHNOLOGY

Acer plans to start selling the latest version of its Aspire One netbook in mid-February, the manufacturer announced on Friday.

The first version of the Aspire One, which had an 8.9-inch screen, was launched in June of last year and helped make Acer the top PC-seller in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. The new version has a 10.1-inch WSVGA screen with a resolution of 1,024x600 pixels.

Screen size is not the only difference between the new Aspire One and its smaller relative. Acer does not provide the option of buying one with a solid-state drive (SSD), or with Linux loaded. In contrast, the previous 8.9-inch version can be bought with the Linpus distribution, rather than Windows XP.

The new version of the low-cost subnotebook also does away with the second SD-card slot that was found in the previous model. This slot was designed to hold a high-capacity SD card as a more-or-less permanent storage augmentation to the SSD, which provided a maximum of 16GB. The Linux operating system automatically added the storage capacity of the card held in that slot to the capacity of the SSD, so the omission of the slot in a netbook with neither Linux nor SSD is unsurprising. In addition, the 10-inch Aspire One comes with a 160GB hard disk drive (HDD).