When a new netbook is announced, you can pretty much guess the specs before you even begin reading a company's press release: 1.6-GHz Atom processor, 1GB of RAM, 160GB hard drive, and Windows XP operating system. As such, keyboard quality and battery life have been vital elements in differentiating the various models, but a new element may enter the mix: Blu-ray playback According to this website, the Acer Aspire One 571 uses Vmedia's 32-mm media format, which houses movies inside of plastic cartridges. But in order to properly display HD video on the 10-inch, 1,280 x 720 screen (which uses a cinematic 16:9 format), the 1.66-GHz Atom CPU will supposedly be paired with Quartics' Q1721 Multimedia Coprocessor, to enables both the encoding and decoding of H.264 and other HD formats (up to 1080p). When we reached out to Acer, a company spokesperson mentioned that a prototype was shown at CES, but there aren't any immediate plans to release the Aspire One 571 stateside. The company is also looking into overseas markets, but nothing has been confirmed. We'll continue investigating this tasty morsel of information to see what else can be dug up on this netbook. In the meantime, we propose a question: We're not sold on the idea of Blu-ray on such a small screen, but do you have a desire to watch HD video on a 10-inch netbook?
