ConsumerIT - For Europe's High Volume PC Retailers, Distributors & Builders

Acer CEO JT Wang says a number of the Acer products will soon see the axe-- the company plans to slash its product portfolio by two-thirds in 2012 as it hopes to increase sales by 10% Y-o-Y.

As Digitimes reports, Acer has "simplification plans" that should take around 3 years to complete. Wang says the plans will not affect outsourcing volumes to upstream ODMs, but Acer partners (including Quanta and Compal) decline to give comment at time of writing.

If DigiTimes is correct, such plans confirm Acer's moving away from appealing to the cheaper ends of the market (the approach under ex-CEO Gianfranco Lanci) towards improved inventory management and hopes for profitability.

According to Gartner, Acer lost the top EMEA PC vendor spot in Q3 2011 (with market share down to 13.6%), with EMEA profits crashing by -39.3% Y-o-Y.

Wang also says Wintel will beat Apple and Google in 2012, as ultrabook price reductions will lead the platform to "a phase of surging growth." The Acer CEO expects Apple growth to weaken over the next 2 years, while Google will only achieve flat performance within PCs.

Go Acer to Downsize Product Lines by two-thirds, Says Chairman (DigiTimes)

Go Acer Chairman Optimistic About Wintel (DigiTimes)

by Catriona Campbell, Founder, Foviance

The experience of shopping with a tablet PC is much less satisfying than with your desktop computer. Although the iPad reinvented the tablet computer, unfortunately it appears that the actual surfing experience does not live up to expectations. In a survey of nearly 5,000 people undertaken by Foviance, a global Customer Experience consultancy, it’s clear that the customer experience of tablet computing is relatively poor – customers are up to 18% less happy with their tablet experience compared to their desktop PCs.

The study, which looked at what customers thought of customer experience in the retail, banking, travel and mobile phone markets in the 2nd Annual Customer Experience survey, commissioned by Foviance in association with Econsultancy.

Whilst companies are rushing to create apps on Apple, Android and Nokia stores it seems that they are not delivering for customers. The Apple store now has more than 200,000 apps, far more choice than the 40,000 products in a branch of Tesco but apps are not delivering the experience of their full-blown desktop cousins.

Cloud-based music service rara.com hopes it will attract mass-market customers who don't listen to digital music-- saying 60% of consumers "never experienced any form of digital music."

To do so, rara.com employs a "simple and beautiful" web-based UI (claiming it makes listening to online music as easy as switching on the radio), licensing agreements with Universal, Sony, EMI and Warner and the services of Grammy Award winner Imogen Heap as associate editor.

Powering the service itself is Omnifone-- the same whitelabel service behind Sony's Music Unlimited.

rara.com is now available across a number of European countries, including the UK, Ireland, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Luxembourg, The Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, and Switzerland.

It still might be as competitive as the competition, though-- rara.com demands a monthly subscription fee, while Spotify remains, well, free.

Go rara.com

The CompactFlash Association reveals the follow-up to the CompactFlash format-- the XQD specification, using PCI Express technology to reach data transfer speeds starting from 2.5Gbps to up to 5Gbps in the future.

The CompactFlash format currently has a niche in high-end devices, as professional SLR and video cameras.

The association says the card will write data at a minimum of 125MBps, wheras today's CompactFlash cards write at a maximum of around 100MBps.

It also aims at professional photography and video applications-- promising "video capture over multiple capture files and across file system updates without dropping frames, enabling high quality 1080p capture at high frame rates with either under- and overcranking functionality."

The technology should hit the market sometime in 2012, and has backing from both Nikon and Canon.

Go CompactFlash Association Announces XQD Specification