Commodore Invictus Nettop

This one made my check the calendar, but April 1st is long past.  Apparently, Barry Altman bought the  rights to the Commodore name, and is attempting to rebuild a Commodore USA venture.   Now, a photo of a keyboard PC with resistive touchscreen popped up on the company’s website, labeled Commodore Invictus. There isn’t much info, but apparently there will be an Intel Atom processor, wireless HDMI, NVIDIA ION chipset, and five hours of battery life — in addition to the aforementioned touchscreen display.  The design is certainly, erm, reminiscent of the now available Asus Eee Keyboard (Buy, $599 @ Amazon).

Currently there is no price, street date, or detailed spec sheet available, but we’re sure that all will be revealed in due time.

Ablecom Technology is showing off their new HEC-13 nettop ahead of Computex next week. It’s powered by a Dual Core Intel atom 1.66GHz  D510 processor,  has integrated Intel GMA 3150 graphics, and up to 2GB of memory, and space for a 2.5 inch hard drive.

Design-wise, the case looks a bit like a massive heatsink, which would be cool, but we suspect it’s just plastic.  On the bright side, there are a ton of ports, including a total of 6 USB 2.0 ports, mic and headphonejacks both on the front and back, VGA output, a 10/100/1000 LAN port, and even 2 PS/2 connectors for a mouse and keyboard.  There’s also support for 5.1 channel audio.

It seems like this will be sold as a barebone unit (meaning you add your own HDD and RAM), and there’s an optional WiFi module and you can plug in a WiFi antenna on the back of the unit. If you don’t need WiFi, you could use the Mini-PCIe slot for something else.  The nettop will be available with Windows XP or Linux, although it can also handle Windows 7.

No word on pricing or availability.

The Acer Aspire Revo nettops have been some of the most popular nettops on the market for the last year.  With even the cheapest version (at $199) has killer features, a tiny footprint,  and NVIDIA ION graphics for pumping out HD video, they make great tiny pcs or multimedia devices.  So  it should come as no surprise that Acer taht Acer introduced the new Revo family today. The three new products include:

• Acer Revo multimedia center – An all-in-one media center PC with a wireless remote called the RevoPad which serves double-duty as a keyboard and a touchpad with multitouch support
• Acer RevoView media player – Basically a hard drive enclosure that connects to your TV with HD video support (plus a remote control and support for USB storage devices)
• Acer RevoCenter home storage appliance – Networked attached storage device for storing your media and streaming it over a home network

No word on pricing or availability yet, but the current Acer Aspire Revo nettop with Windows XP and NVIDIA ION LE is still great value for $209 shipped.

Blogee was able to get access to some of the new Revos, so there’s a ton more pictures after the break.

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The sleuths at Techcrunch have discovered what many expected – Google will launch a ‘Google TV’ service and/or device tomorrow in conjunction with its partners Sony, Intel and Logitech.  With partners like that, it’ll be hard to believe that there won’t be some sort of nettop like device there to run the service which, if rumors are to be believed, will be a ‘web enabled internet tv project’.  web-enabled Google TV project.The LA Times is reporting that it will be called ‘Smart TV’.

Not much more to go on right now, but we’ll know more tomorrow after Google’s announcement at the Google I/O Developer Conference.  We’ll post updates here as we get them.