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Acer has a reputation of selling ridiculously cheap laptops. The problem with selling the laptop’s for such a low price is that the components and build quality are also cheap. With the Acer Aspire One, it has none of those. Acer has done a surprisingly good job with their mini note, and having it close to the price of Asus’ EeePC, they’ve entered the game as a very strong competitor.

I picked up the $349 version at Staples, it has quite a decent feature list for the price.

• 1.60GHz Intel Atom Processor N270
• 512MB DDR2 SDRAM (expandable to 1.5GB)
• 8GB NAND flash SSD
• 8.9” WSVGA Acer CrystalBrite Technology (1024 x 600) TFT LCD
• 10/100 Mbps Ethernet LAN
• Acer InviLink 802.11b/g Wi-Fi certified network connection
• Integrated Acer Crystal Eye webcam
• High Definition audio support with two built-in stereo speakers
• Multi-in-1 Card Reader, SD Card reader for storage expansion, 3 USB 2.0, External display (VGA) port, Headphone/speaker/line-out jack microphone jack, Ethernet (RJ-45)
• Linpus Linux Lite
• 9.8”W x 6.7”D x 1.14”H
• Weight: 2.19 lbs
• 1-Year International Travelers Warranty.

Pictures and more after the jump!

Unboxing

From what I have seen, Acer usually packages their laptops in a brown box, throw in some styrofoam, and that’s about it for the packaging. With the Acer Aspire One, they have actually taken some time and designed it.

They show two different colors that the Aspire One is available in on the packaging. I received the blue version.

Acer provides you with a nice slip cover for the Aspire One.

The 3 cell battery is pretty tiny, giving you about 2:30-3:00 of battery life.

First Impressions

The build quality is quite impressive, it feels very solid. The keyboard is a decent size and feels quite comfortable to type on. It’s rather annoying that they tried to fit all of the different languages and various characters onto the keyboard.

Unfortunately, the screen is glossy, but surprisingly it is very viewable even outdoors. The colors look very vibrant and the brightness is perfect for this netbook.

The speaker is located at the bottom of the unit towards the front, and for the size it is a very loud speaker, but I’m definitely going to recommend using headphones if you want to listen to music or watch a movie.

The trackpad is a bit too small for my liking, and the mouse buttons being at the side does take a while to get used to. Acer has also implemented two finger scrolling, which isn’t as accurate as I had hoped, but still seems to get the job done.

The Operating System

Setting up the Linpus OS is easy, only two steps, your language and your password.

Home Screen

Once it’s set up, you are greeted by the simple Linpus home screen. They’ve done a nice job on making a sleek screen to greet you whenever you boot up the unit. Booting it up is quite fast too, takes a little over 20 seconds for me. You get the traditional system tray with a clock, network selector, battery meter, volume level, etc.

Connect

The connect screen contains the web browser, Firefox, along with Acer’s Messenger, Mail client, and RSS reader. Wikipedia, Google Maps, and Hotmail open up in Firefox.

Apparently Acer has a deal with Yahoo, the default search engine and home page has been changed to Yahoo. Firefox works very well on the Aspire One and was very stable when I was using it.

Messenger didn’t like using my @gmail.com live account. I didn’t quite like using it as a MSN client either.

The mail client works quite well. When it downloaded all 5000 of my emails from gmail, it did get quite sluggish when using IMAP and all of those emails. When I switched over to POP and only let it get recent mail, it was much quicker and worked quite well as a mail client.

The RSS reader looks very similar to the mail client. Google Reader is a far superior reader, but for a few simple feeds, it seemed to work well.

Work

In the Work category, you get OpenOffice.org for the work suite. You also get the regular Calendar, Contacts, Calculator, and notes.

Viewing documents on the tiny screen isn’t the *best* experience, but for typing out a word document it isn’t half bad.

OpenOffice.org Calc manages to actually dospreadsheets on the Aspire One pretty well. There is enough viewing room for your average spreadsheet.

Calendar reminds me an awful lot of Palm Desktop. It’s functional and useful, but still couldn’t replace Google Calendar for me.

Contacts has been arranged well and implements into mail and calendar. While it doesn’t have much shine, it gets the job done.

Notes give you that friendly reminder, also adds an icon to the system tray even when you close the note.

Media

In the Fun Category you get Media Master, which is the video/music player, Photo Master, which is the Photo suite, Games, a Webcam Utility, and Paint.

I’m not quite sure why they would use a DVD as part of the logo, since the Aspire One doesn’t have a DVD player, but it works pretty well as a media player. I didn’t try playing back any HD content, but it did play all of the DivX files I threw at it. All in all, it worked well and the UI is quite easy to navigate.

Photo Master is a decent photo manager. Nothing special to say about it

You also get a bunch of preinstalled open source games. If you load up a 3D game, the Aspire One does heat up quite a bit.

The Webcam utility is nothing special, and the webcam on the Aspire One is mediocre at best. OK for video chatting, but it’s not the smoothest camera.

Files

Files doesn’t actually let you access the root filesystem, just your home folder. You get the traditional My Documents, My Music, etc.

Adding Hard Drive Space

One very nice thing about the Aspire One is that it allows you to add space by adding an SD card to the Storage Expansion Slot. It supports SDHC so I added my 4GB card which added the entire card directly to the accessible space, bringing it up from 6.4GB of available to 10.2GB. I suspect that it is using LVM to dynamically increase the space available for you. There are two expansion slots on the Aspire One, the Storage Expansion Slot and a 5-in-1 media reader.

Conclusion

All in all, for $349.99, the Acer Aspire One has great bang for the buck. Anyone who wants a basic laptop just for browsing, checking email, and for word processing, this is the laptop for you. Even for advanced users, this is a great second computer. Linpus isn’t the greatest Linux Distro, but for basic user’s, it’s very easy to use, but if you are even slightly advanced, it’s restrictions are very annoying.

I’ve loaded Windows XP onto it and will be posting a mini-review later.

Pros

• Low price
• Great Screen
• Solid build quality
• Good looking netbook
• Plenty of power for an inexpensive netbook
• SSD Hard Drive
• Easily able to expand the amount of memory

Cons

• 3 cell battery is weak
• Glossy screen (Still a great screen)
• 8GB of storage
• RAM not easily accessible
• Linpus is a pretty restricting OS
• 512MB of RAM is not enough these days

Score: 8.5/10

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 10th, 2008 at 9:37 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.