J.T. Wang
(Credit: Acer)Acer's been on a roll lately, and Friday it rewarded its top two executives.
The world's No. 3 PC maker appointed Acer Chairman J.T. Wang to CEO of Acer Group, which includes Acer affiliates, and Acer Presdient Gianfranco Lanci to CEO of Acer. Wang will also remain company chairman.
In the release regarding the promotions, Acer noted that since the two took over as chairman and president, respectively, in 2005, Acer's revenue has increased from $9.7 billion to $14.1 billion in 2007.
Gianfranco Lanci
(Credit: Acer)
Taiwan-based Acer was the fastest growing PC company in the world in 2007, and leapfrogged rival Lenovo as third-largest vendor of PCs. It grew both organically and through acquisitions, adding Gateway and Packard-Bell to its ranks last year.
Worldwide PC shipments are on pace to grow 15.2 percent in 2008, according to IDC. That's above the analyst firm's March prediction of 12.8 percent growth. But laptop shipments, which have become an increasing force in the PC market, will peak.
Shipments of portable PCs should grow 34.5 percent this year, according to a PC shipment tracker that IDC released this week. That's up from 33.9 percent in 2007 and way above the projected 13.4 percent for next year. By 2012, according to the firm, portables will increase by only 9 percent.
PC makers such as Hewlett-Packard are betting big on notebooks. The company this week released 17 new models, mostly for consumers.
(Credit: Hewlett-Packard)By the end of the year, PC makers will have shipped 310 million units, close to half (145.1 million) of which are notebooks. The rest are desktop PCs and servers, which together on a global basis still comprise the largest slice of the market, but the difference is disappearing fast.
Portables are especially expected to take off internationally this year, growing from 78 million in 2007 to 109.4 million units this year. That's good news for the industry because notebooks and laptops tend to be pricier than desktop PCs, and they should keep average selling prices higher for a bit longer.
But inexpensive notebooks are stirring up the market too. A reason for the dramatic 40 percent bump in international portable shipments has a lot to do with how the numbers have been counted, according to IDC.
The firm said it had previously not included the rapidly growing low-cost mininotebook segment because of the "use of nontraditional PC designs, including the use of embedded or custom operating systems, (as well as) reduced processing power and storage," IDC said. But now, due to the popularity and computing robustness of the Asus Eee PC, the Classmate PC platform from Intel, and OLPC's XO, mininotebooks are included. Plus, the firm notes, the volume of units shipped are actually rising.
Those three manufacturers have some company in the consumer space. Acer, Hewlett-Packard, and perhaps Dell already have, or plan to release, their own tiny laptops.
The scorer's table, courtside at Staples Center.
(Credit: Erica Ogg/CNET News.com)LOS ANGELES--Never mind the nail-biting lead changes down the stretch, or the dazzling display put on by league MVP Kobe Bryant here at Game 3 of the NBA Finals.
Try also to forget Jack Nicholson holding court from his usual spot at Staples Center. Shrug off the fact that Sylvester Stallone, Eddie Murphy, David Beckham, and Hugh Hefner are all sitting a few feet away. One of the biggest stars in Los Angeles Tuesday night stayed quietly out of sight.
Logging the mind-boggling amount of statistics produced in a single National Basketball Association game is an intense undertaking. And the league has fine-tuned a tech setup to get the job done. A private network, a series of tablet PCs, and a precision PC-powered timing system have to work perfectly in concert to collect, process, and deliver game details posthaste.
Tablet PCs are used to input the more than 500 statistical events in a single NBA game.
(Credit: Erica Ogg/CNET News.com)And in the case of the finals, technology partner Lenovo has used both teams' statistics to predict the future. Here at Staples Center, before Game 3 between the Los Angeles Lakers and the Boston Celtics, I'm told that a technology called the Lenovo Stat has already predicted the winner of the series.
With a plus-minus statistic developed by the PC maker, the Stat determines the best possible five-player combination for each team, and it rates them according to their output and effect on their team. The Lenovo Stat, featured on NBA.com, is also distributed to coaches and players.
In the playoffs, the Boston Celtics have a leading rating of +79, the Lakers are right behind, at +66. We'll see what happens, but so far, the series is led by Boston, 2 games to 1, after the Lakers won Tuesday night (to this LA girl's supreme delight), 87 to 81.
But back to the technology. Before tip-off, I got a look at who and what is behind producing the incredibly detailed and specific real-time stats for a game.
Here is one of the monitors that displays the statistics in real-time.
(Credit: Erica Ogg/CNET News.com)"Stats are the language of our sport--or any sport, really," said Steve Hellmuth, NBA executive vice president of operations and technology. That is why the NBA logs statistics of its games in exhaustive detail. In real time, they are processed and fed to media outlets covering the game.
Ensuring that no potential stats go unlogged during the nearly 500 possessions of a single game requires a technical coordinator, a play spotter, and two people tasked with stat input.
Recorded plays include tipped passes, missed shots, illegal picks, charging fouls, and, of course, points scored, rebounds, and assists. In 1,300 regular-season NBA games, that amounts to more than 675,000 statistical events logged, according to Lenovo. At all 29 NBA arenas, the data input specialists use a no-frills ThinkPad X61 tablet PC.
Behind the NBA's Precision Time system is a ThinkPad that parses the clock's stops and starts.
(Credit: Erica Ogg/CNET News.com)The data is instantly sent to the scoreboards plastered all around the court, the with related graphics appearing on the televised broadcast of the game, NBA.com, as well as scores of monitors scattered about the arena at press tables and announcer booths.
The information is also sent over the NBA's private network to Secaucus, N.J., where a host of inputters log metadata related to game highlights. These contribute to the league's digital-video archive, searchable by players, coaches, TV analysts, and even referees looking for trends and details from the video footage, according to Hellmuth, who has had a hand in developing the high-tech statistics-gathering processes for both the NBA and Major League Baseball.
The NBA's also taken to perfecting the timing of the game with special computers. Down at the scorer's table, closer on the edge of the court, is a ThinkPad, which acts as a "parser." It records every time the game clock is stopped and started again.
The belt pack worn by NBA referees signals when to stop and start the clock. It's held by its inventor, Michael Costabile.
(Credit: Erica Ogg/CNET News.com)It's synched up with a remote unit the referees wear on their belts. Every time one of them blows their whistle, the sound sends a signal to the belt unit, which tells the clock to stop and start. The system, used by most college sports arenas as well, was invented by Michael Costabile, president of Precision Time.
The league uses this method because it's the least error-prone. "A human takes two-tenths of a second" to stop the clock after hearing the referee's whistle, said Hellmuth. "That's why we say 'a game is 48 minutes long, more or less'--because there are humans on every side of it."
It may be sitting pretty atop the PC market, but Hewlett-Packard isn't going to sit still.
The world's largest PC manufacturer plans to roll out 50 new products Tuesday at a conference in Berlin, the largest such product refresh in the Personal Systems Group's history. Of those products, HP added new touches to just about everything, freshening up its TouchSmart all-in-one desktop, commercial and consumer notebook lines, as well as two machines within its high-end gaming brand, Voodoo PC.
While it's that time of year for product refreshes, this is more than the usual speed bump or spec tweak. Though competitors like Dell, Acer, and Lenovo are increasingly focusing on consumer retail PCs, HP is showing that it doesn't want to give up any of the ground it's gained over the last couple quarters.
"They're fortunate for being in right place at right time: being in consumer, and being in retail," said Richard Shim, PC analyst with IDC. "They're showing they're not taking that for granted, and keeping consumers engaged in the products."
It's a tough task when most PCs are made by the same manufacturers with products from shared suppliers. That's where HP hopes its new and improved TouchSmart PC comes in.
It's slimmed down in size--far more minimalist in design concept--and price compared with the original model, but the key is really the improved touchscreen interface. Exterior design used to be a way to stand out, but with a category in decline like desktops, a unique software experience could be an attention-getter.
Offering an experience that you can't get from a Windows-based Dell, or even an Apple iMac, is complicated, said Shim. "That really separates the major players from the minor players, since only the big guys can afford to do this kind of thing. HP is taking advantage of its position in the market."
The new HP-only interface is also a kind of "end-run" around Microsoft's Windows we'll be seeing more often, said Ross Rubin, director of industry analysis for The NPD Group.
It's already happening in the mininotebook category, where instead of being limited to one option for an operating system, PC vendors are offering different flavors of Linux, as well as alternate interfaces that sit on top of Windows.
Design continues to be a priority for HP, as evidenced by the new products, from the high-end to the refreshed line of consumer notebooks, to the new brushed aluminum finish for its commercial Elite line.
But it's the Voodoo brand where HP is most able to experiment with new looks.
Last week, Rahul Sood, Voodoo PC's founder and current CTO of HP's global gaming business, released photos of him cutting his birthday cake with the famously thin MacBook Air. In the accompanying blog, Sood slyly remarked that he "wouldn't be needing this notebook for long anyways."
The Voodoo Envy 133
(Credit: Hewlett-Packard)That's because HP's got its own razor-thin notebook now, called the Voodoo Envy 133. Though the price (starts at $2,099) puts the machine out of reach for most mainstream PC buyers, the ultrathin and light Envy is HP's attempt to position the Voodoo brand name in the same arena as Apple and Lenovo. For now Voodoo still has limited awareness outside the gaming and performance PC enthusiast crowds. As with the Blackbird 002 gaming desktop, the Envy will tie HP's recognizable brand to up-and-coming Voodoo.
The other Voodoo product released Tuesday is a departure for the brand in another way. A new gaming tower, the Voodoo Omen, is unlike anything HP has released before, and has no real counterpart in terms of design in the gaming world. The Omen is stark and simple on the outside, with brushed aluminum tower with the Voodoo logo on the face replacing colorful plastic. It's nearly the exact opposite of last year's Blackbird, or
Despite all this, there's still big challenges for HP ahead as it attempts to differentiate its products from the rest of the field and offer a wide array of products. Not only are they trying to take on Apple in terms of design and innovation, but it's still doing battle with and old, but suddenly resurgent foe, Dell. Plus, Acer is selling notebooks like hotcakes, and even Asus is trying to push its way into the consciousness of the mainstream PC buyer.
So despite the progress the company has made, HP can't get comfortable.
"The challenge for them, is that other guys will do same thing," observed Shim of IDC. "The difficulty for HP is to integrate new technology and new innovation and still remain price competitive."
This blog has been updated with Dell executive and analyst comments.
It's not a blow-out quarter, but Dell investors will likely be pleasantly surprised.
The Round Rock, Texas, PC maker reported its first-quarter earnings Thursday, with revenue of $16 billion, a 9 percent improvement from a year ago, and earnings of 38 cents per share, a 12 percent increase.
Analysts were expecting earnings of 34 cents per share and revenue of $15.4 billion to $16.2 billion. In after-hours trading Thursday, shares of Dell were up 7.5 percent.
Following a turbulent 2007, Thursday's results were a more encouraging beginning for this year. "We're beginning to see positive results in our performance," founder and CEO Michael Dell said during a conference call with company investors Thursday afternoon. He pointed to growth in all business segments in all regions as the impetus. He said that while the industry grew 14 percent in unit shipments, Dell was able to grow 22 percent.
But is this the comeback that Dell has been promising, and investors have been waiting for? Not quite. However, it appears the company is at least on the right track. Though the No. 2 PC vendor in the world has fallen behind both HP and Acer in notebook sales, Dell showed improvement in the past year. Notebook revenue was up 22 percent over the past year, but just 2 percent from the previous quarter.
"I think our results demonstrate we made some progress, but still a lot more to be done," said outgoing Chief Financial Officer Donald Carty, who is to be replaced by Brian Gladden on June 13.
Cost reduction was one of the company's main goals in the past year. Dell reduced its headcount by 3,700 people during the quarter, many in its consumer products divisions and in international sales, for a total of 7,000 in the past year, according to Carty. The company said in the same quarter a year ago it planned on removing 8,800 positions. Dell also said it has added about 2,700 employees through acquisitions, bringing the net employee reduction to 5 percent, and Carty emphasized that more thinning of company ranks is coming.
The Wall Street Journal's Walt Mossberg interviews Michael Dell at the D6 conference this week.
(Credit: Dan Farber/CNET News.com )It's been over a year since Michael Dell hit the reset button, promising to revitalize his company that had fallen behind its main competitor, Hewlett-Packard. Dell admitted publicly at D6 Wednesday that his company had indeed missed a few very big trends, including retail and a focus on consumer products.
It was also a year ago that after telling his employees the company's hallowed direct model was no longer "a religion," Dell products first began showing up in Wal-Mart stores. Now Dell PCs and printers are available at many of the major electronics retail outlets worldwide.
Carty specifically pointed to retail initiatives as one of the driver's of the better-than-expected quarterly performance. Dell added 2,000 more retail locations worldwide in the past quarter, including Costco in the U.S., Best Buy in Canada, and several large Chinese outlets, to bring the total to 13,000 locations around the world.
But it's still too early to tell if the company's momentum in retail can be sustained.
"Are they getting a pop because they've just entered retail?," asked John Spooner, analyst with Technology Business Research. "Retail didn't get it fully in place until this January, so I wouldn't pass judgment until Q4 this year."
Unfortunately the timing isn't great in regard to the U.S. economy. In the earnings announcement, Dell acknowledged "conservatism in IT spending in the U.S. particularly with its global and large customers as well as public, small, and medium business accounts." The company said it expects the conservative spending trend to continue on through summer.
However, the company is making huge gains internationally. For the first time in the company's history, sales outside of the U.S. reached 50 percent. Dell particularly has its eye on the booming Chinese market.
"We believe China is going to become the largest retail market in the world for PCs," Michael Dell said. Dell's unit sales increased 140 percent in China over the last year, and the company plans to reach 3,500 retail locations in China alone by the end of the next quarter.
China, as well as India, are becoming the place for Dell to experiment, not only with products, but with different business models and with customers with no previously established sense of what to expect from Dell.
"In China you can blast out a run of 1 million notebooks, call them Dell 'X,' sell to distributors, and do pretty well," said Spooner. It's a great way for the company to test out products and market strategies before bringing them to their more established markets.
And it's clear there's still more change to come. Michael Dell said the company is still planning to introduce many more new notebook models by the end of this year. He specifically mentioned an "active back-to-school" season. Besides the already announced Latitude E series, it will be interesting to see if this is when Dell decides to introduce the mini-notebook Michael Dell was seen carrying around with him at the D6 conference in Carlsbad, Calif., Wednesday.
Sprint Nextel's plan to spin off its WiMax network and form a $14.5 billion joint venture with Clearwire may have hit a speed bump.
On Monday iPCS, Sprint Nextel's largest affiliate, said it will try to block the deal that was announced last week. iPCS, which serves 640,600 subscribers in seven states, said three of its subsidiaries have filed suit in Cook County Circuit Court in Illinois against Sprint for violating an exclusivity contract.
Sprint Nextel is spinning off its 2.5 GHz assets to form a joint venture with Clearwire. The new company, called Clearwire, will sell 4G wireless services using a technology called WiMax. Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Intel, Google, and Bright House Networks have invested $3.2 billion in the new company.
iPCS , which sells wireless services under the Sprint brand in states like Illinois and Iowa, says it has the exclusive right to sell services under the Sprint brand in 81 markets. In its lawsuit, the company says that the new Clearwire service would compete against its iPCS's service, violating the exclusivity contract it has had with Sprint since 1999.
iPCS has already sued Sprint once before for violating the same exclusivity contract when it bought Nextel Communications in 2005. Earlier this year, an appellate court in Illinois upheld a lower court ruling that found Sprint in violation of this contract. And it ordered Sprint to divest itself of all Nextel assets in the iPCS territory. Sprint is appealing the decision.
Sprint and Clearwire, which value their new company at $14.5 billion, said they expect the deal to close in the fourth quarter of this year. But the current legal troubles could slow down the process.
In anticipation of legal challenges, Sprint last week asked a Delaware Chancery Court to rule that the Clearwire transaction doesn't violate the exclusivity arrangement with iPCS.
A Sprint representative said that iPCS's lawsuit was in response to this filing.
Since the Nextel merger, Sprint has bought at least seven affiliates to resolve legal issues. And some analysts believe the company may try to acquire iPCS to ensure the WiMax spin-off goes smoothly. But with Sprint's core customer base dwindling and its losses widening, it may be difficult for the company to put a deal together any time soon.
Also on Monday, Sprint announced it had lost another 1.1 million customers. The company also reported a quarterly loss of $505 million.
When Robert Pedersen's Dell Inspiron E1705 laptop went on the fritz, he naturally assumed the 5-year Next Day service warranty he purchased would get him instant help from the company's customer service staff.
That was April 18. By May 4, he still had yet to have his guaranteed next-day in-home repair appointment scheduled. And it wasn't for lack of trying. He sums up his frustration on his blog: "Close to a month, 37 different communications, a Certified letter to the CEO of Dell Computers, Inc, and 29 actual hours working directly with Dell Computers, Inc in my attempt to simply get my Dell laptop repaired or replaced."
Pedersen certainly isn't alone. Most people who own a computer can probably cite at least one example of bad customer support or an unresolved technical issue with their PC maker. And to be fair, customer service is one of those thankless jobs. Rarely do we hear or read about good service experiences. Bad customer support is what gets written--or blogged--about.
But Dell seems to get the
So what happened? A combination of doing business in a maturing industry, the resource-intensive demands of being a consumer tech company, and the company's evolving business model is likely what tripped it up.
As disaster stories circulate, public perception also becomes a problem (Hewlett-Packard is ranked 76, while its Compaq brand, for example, is actually last at 73 in the rankings, yet you don't hear noisy complaints about their service as often).
"(Dell is) below the industry average" of 75, said professor Claes Fornell, head of the ACSI at the University of Michigan. "For a company that has really been a high flyer--they were No. 1--for them to drop is problematic."
Consumer Reports this week ranked tech support among PC companies, and Dell came in third in notebook support with a score of 60 out of 100, far behind Apple with 83. It also trailed Apple's score of 81 in desktop support with a score below 60.
It's not as if Dell's not trying or unaware of customer perception. The company says its own metrics show improvement in the past two years. "But we're not finished. We are going to put much more rigor around our service delivery record and aim to improve so we can meet our customer expectations in this critical part of the business," said company spokesman Bob Kaufman.
Dell is known for actively taking suggestions from customers, and has already poured millions of dollars into improving how it helps its customers. Last month Dell announced the availability of more premium services for consumers for more specialized support, and two years ago the company said it would invest $100 million in tech support and put more resources behind its remote support operation. Experts say two years should be more than enough time to show improvement in customer satisfaction.
Luckily, those same customer service gurus say there are concrete steps the computer maker can take to get customer service back on track:
Decide what you are
The tension seems to lie with Dell's identity: Is it a manufacturing company? Or a consumer products company? Manufacturing companies are always looking at the bottom line. Cutting costs and doing more with fewer resources to squeeze the most value it can.
Consumer-facing companies, particularly technology companies, have to do a lot of handholding with customers. And tech support is resource intensive: it requires knowledgeable people answering the phones helping callers who may or may not know the difference between, say, a USB port and an Ethernet port. To this point, Dell says that 80 percent of the time most computers that have issues, the problem is not the hardware.
Another key to the company's troubles is likely found in how fast it grew, says Donald Rosenfield, a senior lecturer in management and operations strategy at MIT's Sloan School of Management. Dell became the largest manufacturer of PCs in the world in the early part of this decade, but after dominating, has since dropped to No. 2.
"When a company grows, sometimes they don't pay as much attention to all aspects of the process as they should," said Rosenfield. "In Dell's case, they didn't focus on services as much as they should have."
Plus, he said, the focus on cost reduction to stay competitive in a commoditizing industry, didn't help. "That led them to trouble in last year or two, though they have tried to devote a lot more attention and resources to customer service."
Customers love customization
Customer satisfaction can be measured in three basic ways: Price, quality of the product and service, and the fit between customer needs and a company. In his years of doing the ACSI, Fornell says price is the least important. Second-most important is the quality of product of service.
"The one that's the most critical of all is rarely discussed," he said. "The fit between the customers specific needs and wants and what the company is offering." In other words, customization is king.
Dell began business selling made-to-order PCs. You could say there's been a correlation between Dell's customer satisfaction ranking and shift in the company's business model. As the PC industry has matured, as Dell became more popular as a brand, and the company's direct model moved toward offering more mass-produced computers, including now at mainstream retail.
A possible fix for Dell's service woes could lie in more customization, or better product targeting or segmentation. "If you have a good fit between buyer and seller, you have a high level of satisfaction," said Fornell.
Get up close and personal
Another way to improve could be to have more in-person support. Though online or remote tech support is cheaper and sometimes enough to fix a problem, face-to-face service could lead to more satisfied customers.
"A lot of their problems stemmed from, as they expanded rapidly and they tended to outsource their operations, they set up these call centers around the world. I don't think the service they were getting out of them was as good as it was before they did all this expansion," said Rosenfield.
Invest in quality
Of course, there's another way around all of these issues--the Maytag approach, or making products that don't break. Consumer Reports says that all PC companies, from Apple to Lenovo, see the same quantity of service calls generally.
It's a change the Japanese auto industry embraced two decades ago, and Fornell says the entire PC industry could benefit.
"They just made sure customers didn't have to go to dealerships for service and made cars very reliable," he said. "There would probably be a market for a more costly product if it could be demonstrated that it was more reliable and did not break."
What manufacturer wouldn't want that?
UPDATED at 1:25 p.m. PDT to clarify RAM in the computer is measured in megabytes.
Perhaps the days of looking at Cuba as the island that technology forgot are beginning to wane.
Late last month, President Raul Castro's government lifted the ban on ordinary citizens from owning a cell phone and getting cell service, a right previously limited to executives working for foreign companies or high communist party officials. DVD players, motorbikes, and plug-in pressure cookers also went on sale for the first time.
Now, citizens of the communist-controlled country can for the first time be the proud legal owners of a desktop computer, according to an Associated Press report. More than a dozen prospective buyers were lined up Friday outside Havana's state-run Carlos III shopping center for a chance to buy the tower-style Qtech PC and CRT monitor for $780, according to the report.
However, like the 50-year-old cars that roam Cuba's streets, the PCs are near relics of yesteryear, boasting Intel Celeron processors with a 80GB hard drive and 512MB of RAM and running Microsoft's Windows XP operating system. (However, I know a few people who would call the Cubans lucky for not being subjected to Windows Vista.) The report notes that buyers in the U.S. can buy a computer with twice the memory, a 80GB SATA hard drive, and 22-inch LCD flat-screen monitor for less money.
But don't expect to start surfing Cubans' blogs about what it's like to collect a state monthly salary of about $20 anytime soon; most of these PCs will not be allowed connections to the Internet, according to the report. Only trusted officials and state journalists are allowed access to the Web.
However, like many things forbidden by the state, computers and even e-mail services have been available to Cubans on the black market, according to the report.
Thanks to a new software driver Nvidia is cooking up, any PC game can be played in 3D, with no extra work on the part of game developers.
Beginning this summer, any PC with an Nvidia graphics processor will have the ability to run a game in normal mode, or in 3D, with the aid of 3D glasses.
Nvidia's Drew Henry models the working prototype of 3D glasses.
(Credit: Erica Ogg/CNET News.com)The software driver will enable the ability to have two views--left eye and right eye--which, at the push of a button, appear blurry and pixelated to the naked eye. When viewed through 3D lenses though, the game pops into three-dimensional mode.
The important part is that game developers won't have to do anything differently. They just continue to make their games the way they want, and Nvidia will take care of the rest. It's just an option for gamers though--it doesn't mean all games have to be three-dimensional.
The challenge for Nvidia is making the glasses widely available at retail, as well as turning the silly-looking lenses into something actually cool and "not as geeky-looking," said Drew Henry, general manager of the company's Media Communications Processor (MCP) group.
And yes, they promise the final product will be much cooler than the glasses pictured above.
Up-and-coming PC maker Acer is shifting its lineup a bit.
At its first-quarter investor relations conference in Taipei on Wednesday, Acer President Gianfranco Lanci said the company would release its first smartphone--a Windows Mobile device--by the end of this year or early next year, and that smartphones will account for 10 percent of company revenue.
Acer: Smartphone is due in the next year.
(Credit: E-Ten)Acer made its interest in the smartphone market very clear in March, when it purchased fellow Taiwanese company E-Ten, which makes smartphones under the Glofiish brand.
At the conference, Acer said E-Ten would shift entirely to smartphones and away from PDAs, which it has sold in the past. In another change, the new Acer smartphone will be sold through wireless carriers, instead of directly to retail, as E-Ten has historically done.
Acer has played catchup to its PC rivals this past year, growing organically as well as through acquisition. The company bought U.S.-based Gateway and Europe's Packard Bell, and now finds itself behind No. 2 Dell with 9 percent of worldwide market share, according to IDC.
But will Acer be able to stir up the smartphone industry the way it has PCs? It's obviously not impossible for a new smartphone maker to enter the market and quickly scoop up share (hello, iPhone), but Acer is obviously no Apple. It doesn't have the same marketing machine or demonstrated design chops. But it doesn't have to make the next iPhone to find success. Betting on the evolution of mobile computing from laptops to a smart device like a phone is a no-brainer at this point.
