Acer Group Inc yesterday launched its Personal Activity Centre a communications workstation that unites computing and consumer electronics by including integrated telephony, facsimile, radio, stereo sound, CD-ROM and multimedia capabilities. Acer claims that its machine is unique, a first, and is spearheading the direction that future technology will take. The AcerPac 450 is certainly cheap enough to be commercially viable at UKP2,000; and this with margins in excess of 20% – a benefit of manufacturing in Taiwan. It developed the hardware in Taiwan, and the software in Europe. The Personal Activity Centre is aimed at three major markets – the home, where it will be sold through dealers, distributors and high street retail chains, such as Dixons Plc, where it will be bundled with speakers, games and educational software at no extra cost. Features of possible appeal to this market include a music centre, comprising AM/FM radio tuner with scan capabilities and 16 programmable pre-set stations, a compact disk player, and an eight channel mixer to adjust the tuning and balance of the radio or CD-ROM – the latter has potential applications for home-based education, providing on-line tutorials and reference guides. This is manufactured by Sony Corp, while audio capabilities are provided by the Sound Blaster chip set. The second market is the home office or small business user, since the machine has all the basic tools for managing a small business, excluding printer and photocopier. Tools include a built-in digital telephone answering machine that receives voice and facsimile messages via the proprietary StartSmart program. This automatically switches the machine on when it hears a message coming through, recognises the medium being used, and then turns the machine off after the message has been recorded. SmartStart can also be used to set the AcerPac 450’s alarm clock to tell the system when to wake up, and can date and time in-coming messages as well as play them back and erase them. Auto-dialling and remote access is possible from touch-tone telephones and electronic mail and voice-mail functions may be incorporated at a later date. The machine also has a built-in facsimile modem. The third potential market is the corporate arena, including government, education and local authorities, expected to like the multimedia capabilities for creating graphic or animated presentations. CD-ROM would benefit telemarketing, sales and customer services departments, which need big databases and fast response times, while integrated telephone, facsimile and office software would be useful for adminstrators and secretaries. The Personal Acitivity Centre is based on an upgradable Intel Corp 80486SX processor. A standard AcerPac 450 has a 3.5 floppy drive, 130Mb hard disk, 4Mb RAM, in-built speakers and microphone. It comes bundled with Windows 3.1, and a proprietary front-end, which uses graphics to depict the various functions provided. Ethernet and Token Ring boards are supported. The company hopes to sell 10,000 to the home market, 10,000 to the small business user and approximately 20,000 to corporates in the first year.
