Acer AspireRevo: A half-decent mini PC? One can but hope

Those pint-size, low-cost Eee Box PCs from Asus have new competition from Acer. The company has announced its AspireRevo mini PC, which is an ultra-dinky Intel Atom-powered desktop, small enough to be attached to the back of your HDTV. And with Nvidia graphics, the claims are that it'll handle 1080p video just fine.

These slim PCs are the desktop equivalent of netbooks, which in turn are the laptop equivalent of being punched in the fingers and eyes. Acer's new AspireRevo has a 1.6GHz Intel Atom processor, up to 4GB of DDR2 RAM, a standard 160GB hard disk or SSD variant, and a 16-core Nvidia Ion platform, capable of outputting graphics up to 2,560x1,600 pixels.

CNET UK's PC editor Rory Reid thought it looked like a better alternative to the Eee Box, mostly thanks to the GeForce 9400M graphics processor. "I've seen it running 1080p video and Call Of Duty 4 in the flesh, and I was impressed," he said.

Fittingly, Acer does have some gaming hopes for this thing. Because the graphics capabilities are supposedly the dog's satchel, there's an option to buy an AspireRevo with a Wii-like 3D controller. Y'know, for pretending it's a tennis racket or whatever. But if you don't care about gaming, you can use it as a wireless pointing device, like a media centre remote.

No UK prices have been released (we asked) or availability dates announced (we annoyingly asked again), but we'll keep you posted. Until that moment arrives, why not browse a pile of photos in our gallery above? There's no better way to spend an afternoon. Seriously, we checked.