Acer Aspire One: Impressions

With our trip to E3 fast approaching I thought was time to prepare myself technologically.  Not being a fan of laptops, I have never seen a need to have a computer at hand at all times.  Well, this hasn’t changed much, but since I know my wife will not let me borrow her precious laptop for the week long trip, I had to finally break down and by a portable PC.  What I ended up buying was one of the smallest notebook computers on the market, the Acer Aspire One.  This notebook falls into the prestigious category of “netbook”.  A netbook is considered a sub-compact laptop.  Just think of it as the Yaris of PCs.  It’s equipped with an Intel Atom 1.60 GHz Processor, 1 GB of memory and 160GB of hard drive space (I find the amount HDD space pretty awesome).  It has no CD/DVD drive, a tiny 8.9 inch screen and runs on Windows XP.  My thought was that I won’t need this for anything but surfing the net, word processing,  and reading a comic or two, so these minimal features will be plenty.  It obviously is wireless enabled and depending on the model you get, can be blu-tooth compatible.

Currently its one of only a handful netbooks of its kind on the market, many of which have the Atom in them.  The features on any “netbook” can vary from solid state hard drives to 3G compatibility to machines powered by Linux, but the principle feature of all of them is that they are seriously tiny.

My Aspire One sitting on my wife’s regular sized Aspire, (yeah, it’s that small).

At first glance, an un-educated consumer will not realize that the Aspire One is a fully functioning computer.  I think my cousin’s first words after seeing it in action were “Holy crap dude, is that running XP?”  The keyboard is criminally close to full sized and the buttons have a nice feedback to them when typing.  In fact, the keyboard is easier to use than many of the new HP/Compaq PC bundled keyboards.  The touch pad has a strange button layout, due to the size restrictions (the left and right click buttons are on the left and right sides of the touch pad).  This is only a minor inconvenience and I can see myself getting used to it pretty quickly.  So, for what I need the machine to do, it is working marvelously.

The best part is that, currently the base price for a Aspire One is less than $300.  However, if you are a tech junkie looking for something powerful, or even something that will run numerous basic tasks at once, you will be disappointed in the One.  If I run Firefox, Zune, utorrent, Word, Paint Shop Pro CDisplay and Skype at the same time, I see a good bit of slow down.  To be fair though, this machine isn’t designed to do extreme multitasking, it’s designed to do the job of a computer on a smaller scale and on a smaller budget.  With that in mind, it succeeds.  I will probably be buying a 9 cell battery for it though as 3 hours of usage on one charge is pretty poor, but then again I’m accustom to the seemingly infinite battery life of the Nintendo DS.  Here are the specs of the Acer Aspire One AOA150-1786 (the model I bought).

· Intel Atom processor N270 1.60 GHz, 533 MHz FSB, 512 KB L2 cache