The Acer Aspire Ethos is a brand new desktop replacement laptop, with skills eerily similar to Asus’s NX90 from CES. It’s got 5.1 surround sound, Blu-ray and a polished design, but it costs half the price of the NX90, and sticks a touchscreen control bar right inside the trackpad. We’ve just gone hands on with it so read on for the first Acer Aspire Ethos photos and impressions.
The Acer Aspire Ethos 8943G blows just about any laptop out of the water on paper. It packs a full HD screen, HDMI out for hooking up to a flatscreen, Blu-ray and ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5850 or 5650 graphics, as well as a fingerprint reader, Intel Core i5 or i7 processor and a stonking 16GB of DDR3 memory.
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Seeing the Acer Aspire Ethos in the flesh too, we’re smitten. While we couldn’t test the sound quality, its matte silver back is much more pleasant than the mirror on the back of the NX90, the chiclet keyboard seems sturdy and the edge to edge display has a decent viewing angle.
The stand out feature though is the trackpad: give that circular button on the Acer Aspire Ethos a pop, and mouse functions will be disabled. In its place, you’ll find the touch sensitive buttons for controlling your media that are more typically found up by the screen. They’re responsive, and well placed if you find yourself watching video on the train all the time.
Acer is also bundling its Acer Arcade Deluxe media software on board the Acer Aspire Ethos to manage all your tunes and video. While we’re not at all sure it’ll be easier to use than iTunes, it does come with the ability to encode video for your media player’s perfect format, which should save the less tech-savvy the headache of working out what Handbrake does.
You’ll be able to buy the Acer Aspire Ethos 18-inch model at the tail end of June from £1099.99, and a 15.6-inch model should follow in Q3. Take a look at the Acer Aspire Ethos up close in our gallery right here, right now though to help pass the time.
Out June | £1099.99 | Acer
