The Acer Revo 100 is both slim and practical for any living room with a Blu-ray drive, removable touch pad controller and Acer's clear.fi program that makes connecting to other network device and television as easy as ever. Chris Hardwick and Candace Bailey take a close look at the $549 home theater PC.
Find the full review from Gadget Pron on Attack of the Show after the cut.
What You Need to Know
- It's slim and looks like it will fit in with almost any living room.
- It's like Acer sent someone to steal Sony's plans for the Slimline PS2 in 2004, but they got stuck in a time loop and weren’t able to get out until now.
- You can remove the stand and lay it flat like a traditional Blu-ray player.
- There are three USB ports and an SD card slot.
- So, while it has only a 750 GB drive, the USB 2.0 ports make it very easy to hook up extra media storage.
- The really cool thing about this is the trackpad and keyboard.
- The trackpad on this can sometimes be a little unresponsive.
- We found ourselves sometimes having to click a few times for it to register, but when you hit this button, a keyboard lights up over the trackpad functionality.
- The keyboard was very responsive and one of our favorite features we've seen on a device in a while.
- However, we do feel like it is a slightly odd size.
- It has only a 1.3 GHz processor, which is like a cell phone.
- It can come across as a little slow.
- We ran multiple startup tests and found that it took on average of a minute and a half before we could start browsing the web.
- Chances are though, that you will keep this on all the time.
- We had to sort of adjust our expectations as far as performance was concerned.
- This really isn't something that was designed to be a workhorse.
- As a media center, it’s actually pretty great.
- We streamed HD video from Netflix and Hulu and found that the image was great and colors were vibrant.
- Internet browsing was comfortable; the trackpad, keyboard combo was pretty intuitive.
- We recommend connecting this with ethernet, just so you always have a solid data connection.
- Blu-rays looked great on this; it handled passive scan high bit-rate movies with no problems and with the HDMI and optical audio out, it sounded great too.
Price
- The Revo 100 is available now from Newegg for $550.
Overall Rating
- 3 Seals of Approval Out of 5 (How do we rate gadgets?)
- A home theatre PC is a cool idea, but really hard to execute.
- The trackpad/keyboard is one of our favorite features we've seen in a while, but the keyboard is a little small.
- We do think the price is a little high though and that’s why it got the rating it has.
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