Since Acer was the biggest notebook manufacturer to largely adopt the new AMD Vision platform, it was to be expected that its various subsidiaries would do the same. And that's exactly the case with Packard Bell, which has announced a couple of interesting products based on this platform, including the brand-new dot a netbook, which we've had the chance to catch live for a quick photo session.

The dot a is built around an AMD Athlon II Neo K125 CPU running at 1.7 GHz, accompanied by 2GB of RAM (up to 4GB supported) memory and an HDD providing up to 640GB of storage space. This makes it powerful enough for running seamlessly HD content, which it can also output via HDMI to an HDTV (HDCP content protection also supported).

As expected, the 11.6-inch ultra-portable system is extremely easy to carry around, since it's less than 1-inch thin and weighs just around 1.35 kilos. Plus, it sports a full-size keyboard, as well as a touchpad providing support for multi-touch gestures, including scrolling, rotating images, zooming and browsing in. That's not exactly a big surprise, though, since pretty much every single notebook released on the market over these past few busy days offers the same enhanced functionality.

Since the Packard Bell dot a netbook targets mostly a fashion-conscious crowd, it's available in two very elegant colors, namely Silk Silver and Cashmere Red, while the wave pattern on the cover will certainly do wonders for the overall aesthetic design.

The ultra-portable machine offers plenty of networking and connectivity options, which will allow users to stay online pretty much wherever they might be. Sadly, once again, we don't have any info on just when the dot a netbooks from Packard Bell will arrive on the market, but we sure do hope that it's sooner rather than later.



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