Acer’s new Aspire One D260 goes on sale this week, with the $449 netbook offering the best of both worlds – it can boot into both Windows 7 and Android 2.1.
One day after Toshiba showcased its
Android-based ‘cloud companion’ netbook, Acer has unleashed a dual-boot Windows & Android netbook onto the Aussie market.
The hard drive of the Aspire One D260 contains partitions for Windows 7 Starter Edition and Android 2.1, with users able to choose which OS to run when the netbook boots up.
Acer claims the D260 can go from a cold start to the Android desktop in 15 seconds, with eight hours between recharges on the bundled six cell battery.
For added portability the adaptor builds a reduced-size power brickette into the AC plug, similar to Apple’s charger for the iPhone rather than the conventional Wintel approach of separating the AC plug an the actual transformer.
The rest of the D260’s recipe is a standard netbook play: Intel’s N450 1.66GHz Atom processor, a factory-fitted 1GB of RAM with a 2GB ceiling, a 10.1 inch screen, memory card slot – you know the drill…
The $449 version of the D260 packs a 160GB hard drive while the $499 model bumps this up to 250GB.
The options menu includes inbuilt 3G with support for 2100MHz, 900MHz and 850Mhz so that the networks of all Aussie carriers are covered, although the price of upgrading to ‘Internet anywhere’ status has yet to be advised.
And of course, it's available in several colours: the standard black, a smoky charcoal, purple (shown above) and pink.