In light of the plethora of new and emergent technologies that will be demonstrated at CES 2012 this week, there is one trend in the PC hardware industry we are absolutely certain of at this point. Ultrabook manufacturers are all being positioned in the limelight this year, and they are directly aimed at mimicing the success of Apple's iOS product ecosystem in every profitable manner.

Acer held its Global Press Conference earlier this afternoon at The Wynn Resort and Casino, where it presented a variety of new quad-core tablets and ultra-thin notebooks (ultrabooks) to the general public. Several analysts have recently joked that the announcements were signs of an improving Acer product portfolio, namely because the company now has an actual product portfolio with a sizable amount of leverage to deem it competitive in the mobile consumer electronics market.

During Acer's conference, the company introduced AcerCloud, a cloud-based service which promises to "securely connect all personal smart devices for anytime, anywhere access" in a unified fashion. The service is essentially directly reminiscent to Apple's iCloud service, where media libraries and documents are synced across iOS devices and held remotely in an offsite cloud server with a specified amount of storage between 5GB and 50GB, depending on user needs.



Where Acer failed to differentiate its own service from Apple's iCloud service, however, was in its presentation of the core concepts associated with synchronizing photos across multiple devices (see: Apple's PhotoStream). As several sites have already pointed out, the company's presentation was so reminiscent of Apple's iCloud presentation back in June 2011 that one could deem it a direct rip off and violation of plagiarism in the finest sense of the word.



Let's try a little harder next year Acer, shall we?