Acer Aspire 1420P / 1820PT / 1820PTZ convertible tablets get official
October 23, 2009 at 9:32 am
Acer’s marketing people should be fired. That’s the only conclusion I can come to after coming across what appear to be three identical 11.6-inch convertible netbooks/tablets from the company. Obviously, every company has the right to release different SKUs with slightly different hardware under the hood, but Acer doesn’t make it easy for the end consumer to know what those differences are.
The Acer Aspire 1420P, 1820PT and 1820PTZ convertible tablets have been made official by appearing on the official Acer US website. The only model we’ve previously heard of is the 1820PT that recently got a hands-on in Italy. The 1820PTZ seems to be identical but only sports an ‘Intel Dual Core’ processor as opposed to the ‘Intel Core 2 Duo’ seen on the 1820PT.
This gets confusing as the non-convertible 1810TZ model had the dual-core processor compared to the 1810T i.e. the TZ model was meant to be better, however in the above case the 1820PT is the better specced model.
Still with me? Well Acer has revealed another model, spotted by Engadget, called the Aspire 1420P. As before the specs are near-enough identical to the other two (11.6” multi-touch display, 8-hr battery life) bar the processor. This model comes with an Intel Celeron processor, so is likely to be the cheapest out of the lot.
The rest of the specs for all three models includes 4GB of DDR3 RAM (max 8GB), either 250GB or 320GB HDD, Wi-Fi (b/g), Bluetooth 2.1, HDMI, three USB ports & card reader. All come with Windows 7 Home Premium. Interestingly all three models are listed as having high-resolution (1366 x 768 displays) as well as standard definition ones (1024 x 600). Hopefully, pricing details will follow in due course.
Update: Acer has an ‘Acer Touch‘ product page on its site that shows some of the multi-touch gestures that can be performed with these new devices.
October 23rd, 2009 2:01 PM
does anybody know a release date (for germany)?
October 23rd, 2009 11:47 PM
The 1820PT (Core 2 Duo model), combined with ION2, minimum 5 hours battery and a good price (no more than £475) is the dream machine netbook.
October 25th, 2009 7:45 PM
Looking forward to seeing the 1820PT in the UK. Stunning!
March 8th, 2010 8:42 AM
All these models vanished from the Acer websites for quite a while but have now reappeared, and at least one of the machines is now available for one to three month pre-order on Amazon UK. Perhaps the rumoured difficulties with the touchscreen have been a cause for delay?
A comparison of the specs suggests that the Aspire 1420P, 1820PTZ and 1820PT are fundamentally the same machine with the following significant differences:
1420P: Celeron SU2300 processor
1820PTZ: Pentium SU4100 processor
1820PT: SU7300 Core 2 Duo processor
All three models offer a choice of 1366 X 768 or 1024 X 600 screens (perhaps because 1366 pixels means that the typesize is on the small side for some readers of an 11.6″ screen?). There are within-model differences of disk capacity, standard memory, etc.
The interest of all these machines is that an 11.6″ convertible tablet screen is a different compromise from the 10″ offers from Lenovo, Viliv and Asus; faster processsors, wider screens and still-useful battery life mean that portable presentation, movie playback and even effective speech recognition can be combined. Bring it on, Asus (sometime before midsummer’s day?).
March 9th, 2010 9:31 AM
UK pricing is emerging, one source only as yet:
Acer Aspire Timeline 1820PTZ Touch Screen Laptop – LX.PNA02.018 £539 incl. tax (say 594€ or $807, but European prices are generally higher than US)
Diamond black, Intel Pentium SU4100 / 1.3 GHz, 3GB (2+1) 1066MHz RAM, 160GB disk, 1366 x 768 ( WXGA ) display, Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium
http://www.acerdirect.co.uk/Acer_Aspire_1820PTZ_Laptop_LX.PNA02.018/version.asp
Acer Aspire 1420P Touch Screen Laptop – LX.PL902.049 £450 incl. tax
(say 496€ or $674, but European prices are generally higher than US)
Diamond black, Intel Celeron SU2300 / 1.2 GHz, 2GB 800MHz RAM, 160GB disk, 1366 x 768 ( WXGA ) display, Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium)
http://www.acerdirect.co.uk/Acer_Aspire_1420P_Laptop_LX.PL902.049/version.asp
The 1420p is available for pre-order at Amazon Germany at 525€, but this is a merchant quoting 3-5 week delivery – and the entry was first spotted in December! The 1820PTZ is 593€ direct from Amazon with 1-2 month delivery.
The German machines are higher spec – more RAM, disk, and interestingly Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit.
March 11th, 2010 7:43 AM
Both screen and trackpad support multitouch gestures in Windows 7, and there’s a stylus too which can be used for more accurate handwriting recognition
More: http://bit.ly/acer-aspire-1820pt-impressions