We recently posted a review of the Acer Aspire One netbook at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Czh0LKxwzg. I promised to write a review to follow up the video in more detail.
The Acer Aspire One is a fairly mid range netbook with medium performance, price and portability. At £260 it may seem like you don't get much for your money but most netbooks are still highly priced as they haven't yet reached the mass market. Unless they increase in power dramatically my opinion is they never will.
Performance: The netbook has an Intel Atom 1.66 GHz processer and comes with a full gigabyte of DDR2 RAM installed. The RAM, while more than adaquete for everything you will do on the netbook is let down by the tiny amount of processing power. The processer isn't capable of anything more than multiple tabs in firefox and a word processer at the same time. Anything else is met with a signifacant drop in performance.
Portabillity: The netbook has a 10.1 inch screen which makes it extremely easy to carry around. Although the solid state drive makes it slightly less robust than the flash drives in some other models of the Aspire One the extra storage space is well worth the trade off. Another trade off is the 6 cell battery which protrudes from the back but is well worth the 8 hours of internet browsing. This is still a fairly small machine and while it won't fit in your pocket it can be carried around very easily weighing only 2.9lbs.
User Interface: The keyboard too small for what it could have been but XP runs more or less smoothly on a machine that it was never designed for. Worst of all about the interface is the trackpad which is difficult to use, doesn't match the screen and shows precisely how XP was designed before the age of hand gestures on it. Worst of all the gestures were not designed well and you will find yourself trying to move the mouse one way and the screen will be magnified by 50%. A lack of an optical drive also lets it down.
Altogether I give this product a 6.5/10.
It is an extremely portable machine and is powerful enough for what is required of it but the way that you must interface with the machine could easily have been avoided and improved upon. If all you want to do is browse the internet and occasionally take notes down then buy an ipod touch. It is a much better user experience. Be sure to note that this is not a replacement for a pc.
0 comments:
Post a Comment