Acer Aspire One Notebook
Despite of what most of you may think, the Acer Aspire One series is not a notebook. Even if it looks like one, this gadget was designed for one big main purpose, and that is to be able to use the internet wherever you are. Since it’s not very good at anything else, this little machine is called a netbook.
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When you hold an Acer Aspire One netbook, the first thing you are going to notice is that if it were any smaller, you could probably put it in your pocket. The second thing you are going to notice is that the glossy lid is an ideal surface for attracting fingerprints so unless you can restrain yourself from touching it all the time, you will probably need to keep a fiber cloth in handy. Other than that, this netbook which is available in white, black and blue is surely a little beauty and it’s so compact and small that it takes portability to a whole new level. Now you can keep in touch with the help of the Acer Aspire One whether you are in a hotel room, on a plane, at school, at the cafeteria, coffee shop or in the park.
The keyboard is not very large, but what did you expect from an 8.9 inch netbook? Typing is still very pleasant and you get a good key-response. Small keys are something you can easily get used to if you really are in need of a portable gadget. The touchpad is very small and it may be a bit weird to use those mouse buttons which are positioned on the left and right side of the touchpad instead of underneath it. This is a matter of saving up some space and sacrifices are to be made in such cases. You will find that there is not much room for wrist-rest either. You get 3 USB ports, jacks for headphones, microphone and VGA, an Ethernet port and two memory card slots. This is pretty impressive considering the small size of the netbook, we didn’t expect Acer to stuff in so many ports and connections. That separated SD slot is very useful of expanding disk storage. Pretty cool, isn’t it?
One of the main competitors of Acer Aspire One netbook is the Asus Eee PC’s which also have some nice features for a really low price. Let’s compare these two and see which one is better (of course, we will give more details on the Acer). The Acer Aspire One is extremely light as it weights only 995g compared to the 1.1 kg of the Asus Eee 901. This is because the Aspire One has a lighter battery. The design is also a bit different on these laptops, as the Eee has a more childish look and it’s available in five different colors (white, black, golden brown, blue and coral pink). Even if it was launched long after the Eee, Acer Aspire One has gained the love of many netbook users. One bad aspect in the usage of the Aspire One is that you have to get used to those separate mouse buttons which are placed on the left and right side of the touchpad, while the Eee has a normal touchpad layout, which these two buttons located below the touchpad.
The number of ports and connections is the same on both netbooks. The operating system boots faster on the Acer Aspire One but battery life is not that impressive. The Eee PC 901 will last about 4 and half hours turned on with a fully charged battery while the Aspire One can’t handle more than 2 hours when playing a movie. You can choose to buy a 6-cell battery and replace the current one which only has 3 cells. Photos below may give you an idea of how these two netbooks looked like when they are side by side (it’s a surprise they aren’t biting each other’s display off).
Similarities between these two netbooks are the processors used. They both have the Intel Atom N270 processor which is commonly used for netbooks since they are not machines built for power; they are strictly for basic everyday tasks and applications. They both have 1 GB of RAM which should provide enough speed as to not wish to throw this netbook into the garbage can. The Acer Aspire One has a lot more available disk storage than the Eee and this could come in handy if you are away from your primary computer for a long time and need to store a lot of documents or just copy some of your favorite movies for those long and boring trips you have ahead of you. The Eee however has an integrated Bluetooth device which Aspire One does not have but you can always buy an external Bluetooth if that of important to you. Both of these netbooks will run just fine with Windows XP Home Edition installed and as long as you keep in mind what they were made for, you should be happy with both of these little gadgets.
Overall, we find the Asus Eee PC 901 to be more reliable than out Acer Aspire One netbook. The things that pulls the Aspire One back is the battery life which is about 3 hours shorter than the Eee PC’s and this a definite no-no since you will be using this netbook a lot while travelling. Other than that, the Acer Aspire One has really ok features considering the price and the destination of this notebook. 120 GB of disk space plus the 1 GB of RAM are a good combination to provide just what are looking for in a netbook. With a better battery available, Aspire One is really going to put up some stiff competition for the Eee but hey, as long as we got netbooks to choose from, who cares? But before adventuring yourself to buy one of these notebooks, check out the Dell Inspiron Mini 9 and the Lenovo IdeaPad S10. You may be surprised to find some good features on these gadgets as well.
