Reference Auto

Acer is betting big on the Indian market, rolling out a new model of its Aspire series of netbooks, christened Aspire One Happy, in the country.

The Acer Aspire One Happy series comes with a pre-loaded dual operating system that allows users to boot either Windows 7 or Android operating system. This feature could turn out to be Acer’s USP and lead to substantial sales of its new Aspire series.

The Aspire One Happy netbooks have an internal hard disk drive of up to 320 GB capacity and a built-in multi-in-one card reader, allowing convenient storage and file sharing options for the user.

The netbooks have a comfortable keyboard and a wide multi-gesture touchpad. The Acer Aspire One Happy series facilitates Wi-Fi certified connection or fast ethernet, in case someone needs a wired LAN connection.

There is also Bluetooth 3.0+HS, allowing users to share photos and music.

The 10.1-inch Aspire One Happy netbooks come in eclectic colours such as Candy Pink, Lavender Purple, Lime Green and Hawaii Blue. They have a youthful look and may turn out to be a favourite among the country’s young crowd, which makes up nearly 70% of the population.

The Acer Aspire One Happy series comes with an end user price of Rs 16,376 and carry an MRP of Rs 17,999.

Having the same form factor as the Aspire One D260 and 532h, the Aspire One Happy weighs 1.25 kg and has a thickness of 24 mm. It is propelled by an Intel Atom N455 1.66GHz processor, which is rather outdated. It also comes with Graphics Media Accelerator 3150 chispet on board.

Apple will take about a year to launch its iPad2, which has been priced on par with the iPad. After the iPad2 makes its entry into India, laptop makers like Dell, Acer and HP will have to drastically pare prices if they want to stay in the market. Otherwise, there could be a substantial decline in sales of their products.

Acer currently has grabbed 11 per cent of India’s computers market and needs to rev up substantially before the tablet market goes into growth mode.

In fact, Apple’s iPad2 could pave the way for making personal computers as well as laptops redundant one day and that day may not be too far away.

So, just before Apple makes its splash, Acer has launched the Aspire One Happy netbooks to garner a substantial market share and scale up its earnings.