The PC industry recognises that Acer provides innovative and quality products and dependable service and support.

Nigel Gore, Product Management Director, Acer, said “Our success  is a direct result of our products  delivering  the latest technology. When we launched our Aspire S3, we were the first vendor to introduce an Ultrabook in Australia.”

Acer has invested significantly into design innovation, efficient production and delivery, and a high quality  support infrastructure.  Acer  claims  to be the only  tier 1  PC vendor that  still has local assembly capabilities in Australia.

Acer’s growth of 28.46% year-on-year**  highlights  its  success in  offering  product that matches market requirements without heavy investment from the end user.

In addition to Acer’s strong business momentum in commercial  and retail segments,  Acer also contributes its major notebook rollout  into Queensland Department of Education and training  for this positive outcome.

“We take pride in our huge growth in the education sector and our win with Queensland Education is testament to that. Their decision was primarily based on our reliable product solution as well as our strong credentials in large project rollouts and excellent service and support.”

“Looking ahead, 2012 is set to be an exciting year. Our focus for growth in a competitive landscape is to introduce leading edge products such as Ultrabooks and tablets.” Mr Gore continued.

**Source: IDC Asia/Pacific Quarterly PC Tracker, Q4 2011, February 2012

Sydney, Australia, 30 November 2011

Acer Computer Australia has won a Queensland Department of Education and Training (DET) tender to supply notebooks for round three of the National Secondary School Computer Fund. This contract will see the deployment of up to 65,000 Acer Aspire 1830T notebooks before the end of the year.

Charles Chung, Managing Director, Acer Computer Australia, said Acer’s commitment and support for this project would help Queensland students gain the benefits of productive learning in the digital age for many years to come.

“Collaborative and mobile work places are common in today’s environment, and ensuring our students are well equipped to face tomorrows demand is fundamental in that process. Having access to information on demand and the best technology to process that information is important in helping develop today’s students.” Mr Chung said.

After trials to test viability with students, the Acer Aspire 1830T Notebooks were successfully integrated and provided a digital learning environment without boundaries. The 3G-enabled Acer Notebook is being hailed as a first in Australian education for a program of this scale.

“The implementation of HSPA+ 3G technology in the Acer Aspire 1830T Notebook delivers a host of benefits and is a key component to the educational development of Queensland students. They are better equipped to access rich multimedia, websites and school material whilst away from the school’s network.” Mr Chung continued.

As part of the contract between DET and Acer and in conjunction with the National Secondary School Computer Fund, Acer was selected based on a number of areas including the ability to offer a lightweight notebook solution with maximum battery life and portability that ensures the best possible solution for DET students.

Under the agreement, Acer is also set to provide its Educare solution, which includes a Computrace license protecting against theft and a student notebook bag customised by Targus for protection and portability. Both Acer’s global expertise in notebook development and rollout capability operations ensures for a successful rollout plan to be completed before year end.

David O’Hagan, Chief Information Officer, DET said the rollout of 3G-enabled devices has the potential to be life-changing for students. “A rollout of high-end, 3G laptops has never been done before in Australia, let alone on this scale.This 3G initiative will ensure more than 60,000 state high school students have access to the department’s online learning environment, anywhere and at any time.” Mr O’Hagan said.

“The decision to purchase 3G laptops means students will have better access to important online resources, resulting in improved learning outcomes, collaboration and greater opportunity for personalised learning.” Mr O’Hagan continued.

If you’ve been waiting for Android tablets to catch up with Apple’s iPad, the wait might be over.

I wasn’t overly impressed with the first batch of Android tablets. They reminded me of the early Android smartphones like the HTC Dream – brimming with potential but not quite ready for the big time. After spending some time with the sleek new Acer Iconia Tab A500 running Android 3.0 “Honeycomb”, I feel it’s safe to say Android tablets have come of age.

For now Acer is selling the 16GB wifi-only A500 for $579 and the 32GB wifi-only for $678 – impressive pricing compared to the first-gen Android tablets. The A501 wifi/3G models should be available in June.

The 10.1-inch A500 is a thing of beauty and makes a striking first impression. It’s just as slender as the original iPad and is only a tad heavier at 765 gm compared to the iPad’s 680 gm. The A500’s tapered edges help emphasise the feeling of slenderness and the extra weight isn’t really noticeable at first. After a while I found myself resting the A500 on my lap more than I would with the iPad, so I guess you start to feel the weight after a while. That doesn’t bother me too much because I’d say the A500 is designed more for using on the couch than the train. If you’re looking for a smaller and lighter travel companion, keep in mind Acer will also offer a 7-inch A100 – unlike Apple’s one-size-fits-all approach to tablets. The A100 features a pretty meagre 8GB of storage, but the other specs are good and it will most likely be the cheapest entry-level Honeycomb tablet. The wifi-only A100 will be available in June and the 3G/wifi A101 will be available in July.

Getting back to the A500, it utilises an aluminium shell with your standard tablet design but hiding a few surprises. Holding it in portrait mode you’ve got the power button and headphone jack across the top right, with volume buttons and a rotate lock switch down the right side. Below this is a plastic cover which comes away to reveal the microSD card slot and a gap which will take a SIM in the 3G-capable models.

Across the top left you’ve got a micro-HDMI slot – the first indication that the A500 has a few impressive tricks up its sleeve. Halfway down the left side you’ll discover a docking port, which works with the optional charge cradle. Across the bottom edge you’ll find a USB2.0 slot (host), a micro-USB connector (slave). Finally you’ll find a 2 MP camera on the front of the A500, accompanied by 5 MP camera at the back with an LED flash. Also on the back are two speakers.

You wont find dedicated home, menu, back and search buttons for navigating the menus, as these are all onscreen buttons – which makes sense considering the tablet is designed to be used in both portrait and landscape mode.

Under the bonnet the A500 sports an NVIDIA Tegra 250 dual-core processor accompanied by 1GB of RAM – which helps Android sing. You’ll also find 16GB or 32GB of storage.

Fire up the A500 and you’re immediately struck by the bright, crisp screen. The tablet boasts a 1280×800 resolution with a 16:10 aspect ratio – so it’s slightly sharper than the iPad’s 1024×768 display. Of course you need to allow for the difference in screen size. It would seem the fairest way to do this is to calculate the pixel density in pixels per inch – which sees the A500 slightly sharper at 149 ppi compared to the iPad’s 132 ppi. Yet, as usual, comparing devices is more than a numbers game. If you want to apply these calculations to other tablets you’ll find the 7-inch Samsung Galaxy Tab comes in at 170 ppi.

From my testing the 1024×600 Samsung Galaxy Tab didn’t look as sharp as the iPad, but I suspect this is because Android 2.2 Froyo is only designed to support 854×480. Samsung tweaked the Android OS for the Galaxy Tab, but many of the applications still would have been running at 854×480. Of course at that resolution the pixel density would have still been on par with the iPad, but it clearly didn’t look as sharp. Like I said, it’s a reminder that comparing such devices isn’t just a numbers game.

Now that Android 3.0 supports higher resolutions we can expect impressive results from the Honeycomb devices. The Kindle app certainly looks crisper on the A500 than it looked on the Samsung Galaxy Tab. It was the Zinio magazine app which really made the Galaxy Tab look shabby next to the iPad, but unfortunately Zinio is limited to a few devices and isn’t available in Android market. I tried to get Zinio running on the A500 using this workaround but ran into a parsing error trying to install the final file. Overseas reports indicate the A500 comes with Zinio pre-installed and Acer locally tells me there’s been a delay but it will be pre-installed when the A500 goes on sale in Australia.

The A500 utilises an LCD TFT display with an 80-degree wide viewing angle, and can certainly hold its head high alongside the iPad. The A500’s LCD screen doesn’t suffer the blue tinge that you find on many of the AMOLED displays, in fact I’d say if anything the whites are a little whiter on the A500 than on the iPad 1 and perhaps on par with the iPad 2. The A500 does an impressive job of displaying the image of Peter Costello below, the stripes in his suit are clear and there’s plenty of detail in the shadows but the skin tones are still healthy. The A500 also has wider viewing angles, tilting the tablet loses the stripes in the suit on the iPad but not the A500. Once again, the A500 makes the Samsung Galaxy Tab look pretty shabby.
Get the A500 outside and I’d say the screen glare is a little worse than the iPad, but not much. The A500’s slightly whiter whites help compensate.

At this point I have to say Acer’s A500 is by far the best Android-based tablet I’ve seen to date and the only one that I’d consider a serious competitor to the iPad. It certainly sets the bar pretty high for its Android 3.0 competitors and gives me confidence that Android tablets can slug it out toe-to-toe with the iPad this year. On Wednesday I’ll take a closer look at some of the A500’s sweet new Honeycomb features.

Source: http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/computers/blogs/gadgets-on-the-go/hands-on-acer-iconia-a500-tablet-20110418-1dkaz.html

If Rugby League is your game how about joining the BES IT Systems foot tipping competition to have some fun this season and hopefully to win some great prizes from BES on the way. It is free to join and once you are registered in the BES comp there are some options to make the tipping more interesting each week.

You are invited to join the BES IT Systems NRL 2011 Tipping Competition at http://www.oztips.com/

1. Go to http://www.oztips.com/
2. Click the ‘REGISTER’ button on the homepage and set-up a Login (if you don’t already have one with OzTips).
3. Once you have successfully registered a Username and Password, click the ‘JOIN A COMP’ button.
4. Enter the Comp # and Comp Password details above.
5. That’s it! Full instructions on how to Tip can be found on the website by clicking on the ‘Help’ link in the top header.
6. We hope to see heaps of our friends having fun this year with us!

If you have any questions or require further information, please contact Brad Dargusch at the BES office or email brad@bes.com.au

Contact BES today to see how we can help you with implementing Citrix solutions in your organisation:
(07) 3340 5555, info@bes.com.au

HP’s free ePrint service makes it easy for you or guests in your home or office to send documents and photos to your web-connected HP printer—no special software is required. You can send print jobs from a variety of devices – an Apple iPad, an iPhone, a Blackberry or other smartphone, your primary desktop PC, a work or personal laptop, or a netbook computer. Print jobs are securely and reliably sent through email, right to your printer. The solution makes sharing a printer with multiple computers in your home or office effortless.

At home, work, or on-the-go – anytime you choose

HP ePrint technology liberates printing from your home or office by allowing you to print important email and office documents while away from your desk, travelling, or simply out-and-about. Larger documents, presentations, and PDF files can be difficult to read on small, handheld device screens. Now you can easily print documents instead,
to read or share with others.

HP’s ePrint email solution is as simple as attaching your photos or documents to an email message that you forward to a web-connected printer using any device with an Internet connection.

Using HP ePrint email

You can use email as a transport mechanism to send documents and photos from your email-capable device to a web-connected printer in just a few steps:

• Open an email application.
• Select “compose” new email message or “forward” email.
• Attach a photo or document, such as a JPEG photo, Microsoft Word, or PDF file and/or forward an email you’d like to print.
• Enter the email address of the printer (for example, myprinter@hpeprint.com).
• Send the email.
• Receive a “successful print” status message (email feedback also indicates if there was a problem with remote printing).

HP ePrint makes it easy to send and print standard PDF, Microsoft Word and PowerPoint files, text files (.txt), and JPEG, TIFF, BMP, PNG and GIF image files – no printing software is required.

HP ePrint intelligence automatically sends files to the appropriate paper tray. For example, photos are sent to the printer’s photo tray (when available). Documents and email messages are sent to the main paper tray.

Printing an email message with HP’s ePrint solution is as easy as forwarding the message to your printer’s email address. Simply select an email message to print, and choose “Forward.” Enter the printer’s email address in the “To” box, select “Send” and then go to the printer to pick up your printed email. You can use HP ePrint to print email messages with any email-capable device. There’s no need to download and install special software.

Secure, reliable printing

The HP ePrint email address for your web-connected printer is provided when you enable the service during initial product setup and registration. To help prevent unauthorized email, HP assigns a random email address to your printer and does not publicize the address. Your printer’s email address is only available to those whom you have given the address or individuals with direct access to your printer, such as family members. HP ePrint also provides industry-standard spam filtering and transforms email and attachments to a print-only format to reduce the threat of a virus or harmful content.

For further protection, HP offers you the option to place your printer in “protected” mode. This mode lets you limit access to your web-connected printer by creating a “preferred sender” list of the email addresses of family members, friends, business associates, or others that you allow to send email to your printer. Only email messages indicating they are sent from a preferred sender will be sent to your printer.

You can place your printer in protected mode and specify who is allowed to print to your printer by visiting www.hpeprintcenter.com and registering your printer. You also have the option to disable the ePrint service at any time.

To get started with ePrint, press the Wireless button on the front panel of your HP web-connected printer, and select the Web Services menu. From here, you can turn the ePrint service on or off, view your printer’s email address on the front-panel display, and print an information page (some updates may be required to enable certain functionality). For more detail, please see the Setup Guide included with your printer.

All 2010 HP Photosmart network-capable printers with integrated wireless or Ethernet support HP ePrint technology. The feature also is available with select 2010 HP Officejet printers. HP ePrint can be used with any email-capable device that is connected to the Internet. Visit: www.hp.com/go/ePrintCenter for details.

We’re presenting two business class printers that are web-connected and ePrint-enabled:

HP OfficeJet Pro 8500A EAIO A910A

Click Here for more details

HP Officejet 7500A Wide Format e-All-in-One

Click Here for more details

Contact BES today to see how we can help you with implementing Citrix solutions in your organisation:
(07) 3340 5555, info@bes.com.au

1. High Contrast Ratio for Superb Readability

In the education world, high contrast ratios translate to crisp-clear colours in even the tiniest detail that’ll help teachers engage students in learning. They also determine the readability of the projected image. DLP education projectors deliver exactly that by boosting the native contrast ratio from 2000:1 up to 4000:1 using a chip that contains rectangular array of up to 2 million microscopic mirrors. This allows students to enjoy truly saturated and vividly coloured images with deeper, truer blacks and whiter, more pristine whites for sharper, clearer text – even from the very last row of a brightly lit classroom.

2. Flawless Colour Accuracy without Decay

Wit all-digital DLP image processing, DLP education projectors are virtually immune to colour decay – a phenomenon of a projector taking on a yellow or green tint over extended periods of usage. Hence, DLP out-classes LCD with truly vibrant and lasting colours.

3. 3D Visualisation with DLP Link

With 3D becoming the trend for educational resource development for the next 4-5 years, leading DLP projector brands now offer 3D ready DLP Link technology to add a new dimension of effectiveness in teaching and an immersive learning experience for students worldwide. The best part in that 3D functionality is built right into BenQ education projectors at no extra cost! Just add 3D glasses, 3D content and an inexpensive quad video card, and you’re ready to teach in 3D!

4. Filter-Free Design for Lower Maintenance Costs

Unlike LCD projectors, DLP projectors do not need filters to protect them from dust. A filter-free design ensures DLP to be hands-down the only smart choice for all educational projection needs. With no filters to clean or replace, DLP projectors offer lower maintenance needs, which leads to lower costs of operation.

5. BrilliantColour to Keep Colours True-to-Life

A unique colour-processing system, BrilliantColour technology vastly expands the colour gamut beyond that of previous generation projectors – delivering true-to-life images with enhanced secondary colour brightness. Unlike LCD projectors, which use only 3 colours (red, green and blue) to create image on the screen, Brilliantcolour processes up to 7 colours for incredible colour fidelity. With the help of BrilliantColour, teachers will find it much easier to gain an extra hold of students’ attention and interest!

Additional Resources:

Free TCO comparison calculator: Get your budget under control

BENQ Projection Calculator: Calculate the image size and projection distance for all BENQ projectors

BES IT Systems: Ask a question or get AV installation quote
07 3340 5555
info@bes.com.au

More than 65 percent expect that the cloud will likely, most likely, or definitely overtake on-premise computing as the way organizations acquire IT by 2015.

Find more results from the survey, including mobile application development, in this article, IBM Survey: IT Professionals Predict Mobile and Cloud Technologies Will Dominate Enterprise Computing By 2015,