Acer Aspire One review

Sasha Muller October 7, 2009

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£220

Price when reviewed

Asus’ Eee range might have had an easy ride for the last few months, but the challengers are arriving thick and fast. Now Acer’s Aspire one has landed, can it finally mark the end of Asus’ dominance, or is it just another jumped-up pretender?

Before we go any further, let’s get this out of the way; the Aspire one is absolutely gorgeous. It doesn’t share the HP Mini-Note’s extravagant metal shell, but slip it from its tiny box and it’s got curves in all the right places. Our review unit came in pearly white, but it’s also available in a rich shade of royal blue, a welcome contrast to the plain black and white of the Asus Eees. Whatever colour you eventually choose, though, the smooth lines and the little flash of colour on the lid’s hinges all coalesce into a surprisingly attractive whole.

And when you glance at the Acer Aspire one’s price, that surprise may just spill over into amazement. Where other manufacturers have ignored the Eee’s humble laptop-for-£200 beginnings, and consequently found that their £300+ price tags are treading on the toes of fully-fledged laptops, this, the most lowly of Acer’s five specifications, costs just £191. It also offers an assortment of hardware and vital statistics that easily trumps Asus’ most frugal of Eee PCs, the 701.

The basic specification consists of one of Intel’s Atom N270 processors running at 1.6GHz, 512MB RAM, an 8GB solid-state drive, 802.11bg networking and Linpus Linux Lite as the OS of choice. It’s not a specification to get the pulse racing – we’d have liked Draft-N and Bluetooth – but given the modest demands of Linpus’ OS, it’s still plenty enough for the core tasks expected of it – mail, word processing, internet browsing and media playback.

And, talking of the OS, Linpus Linux Lite shows some promise. The front end isn’t visually as neat as that of the Asus Eee, but it does much the same job. Programs are divided into four main headings: Connect, Work, Fun and Files. The usual suspects such as Mozilla Firefox and OpenOffice are present and correct and Asus has opted to use its own proprietary email client, dubbed Aspire one mail.

OpenOffice springs into life with appreciable haste and, in contrast to HP’s Mini-Note 2133, video streams smoothly from Youtube or Blip.Tv in full-screen mode. There’s the odd stutter now and again, and some videos seem a little jerkier than their windowed counterparts, but it never renders anything unwatchable. Disappointingly, though, DivX’s and .VOB files refused to play with the supplied Mplayer software, which claimed to lack the suitable video codecs. We hope this is an omission which will be rectified in production models.

Should you need a bit more flexibility than the basic spec allows for, or would like to dump Linpus in favour of Windows XP, Acer has provided a sensible range of models to choose from. Take a glance at the CCL Computers website and you’ll find the pricing is very reasonable indeed. Add a modest £5 to the £191 starting price and you can opt for a substantially less shock-proof, but far more capacious 80GB hard drive instead. Add another £17 and you can upgrade the 512MB RAM to a full gigabyte. And if you’d rather have Microsoft’s XP Home installed, two models are available: the version with an 80GB HDD and 512MB RAM will set you back £238, and upping the memory to 1GB sees the price rise to a still competitive £255. With 3G and WiMax options coming some time in the near future, the Aspire one sitting in front of us looks to be the first in a very strong lineup.
Regardless of which model you go for, the Aspire one is fantastically usable. It might be a couple of centimetres wider than any of its Eee branded rivals, but Acer has put that extra space to good use. The keyboard stretches all the way to the edges of the chassis and the keys are taller and slightly wider than those on the Eee; a change which is enough to make longer stretches of typing a far more palatable prospect. The half-height enter key still takes a little getting used to, but where the Eees limit you to short bursts of typing, the Acer is far more capable.

Other elements aren’t quite as praiseworthy as, like the HP Mini-note 2133, Acer has shifted the mouse buttons to the left and right hand side of the trackpad. The positioning of the buttons takes some getting used to, but they do at least respond with a crisp click – a clear improvement on the HP Mini-Note’s spongy efforts.

The Aspire one’s screen more than makes up for the trackpad’s shortcomings. At 8.9in from corner to corner and with a native resolution of 1,024 x 600, it effortlessly matches that of Asus’ premium 900-series Eee’s. Side-by-side with Asus’s pricier Eee PC 901, the Acer is just as bright, and only loses out to its rival with its slightly murkier colour reproduction. It’s not a big difference, but skintones looked just that touch more lifelike on Asus’ Eee.

Peer around the Aspire one’s smoothly-contoured sides and connectivity is ample: VGA, Ethernet, USB and an SDHC slot adorn the Acer’s left-hand side, while two audio sockets, another couple of USB ports and a 4-in-1 memory card reader lie to the right. The extra SDHC slot is a real boon, though; fill it with a high capacity SD card and you can supplement the basic model’s storage quickly and easily. Should you opt for one of the mechanical hard drive options, you can use the SD card as a shock-proof storage medium for your most crucial data.

If there’s one major stumbling block with the Aspire, it’s battery life. All the models share the same 2,200mAh battery at their rear and, while sitting idle, our review unit lasted a disappointing two and a half hours, even with the screen set to middling brightness. An extra battery comes as a £68 extra, a supplemental cost that brings the Linux-equipped Aspire one’s price dangerously close to that of Asus’ Eee PC 901, whose single 6,600mAh battery lasted over eight hours.

Battery life is a huge stumbling block, no doubt there, but where buying a spare battery is easily done, improving the lacklustre keyboard of the Asus Eee, or the poor performance of HP’s Mini-Note 2133, is pretty much impossible. And, with that firmly in mind, we find it difficult not to like the Aspire one.

Take the relatively curt battery life on the chin, and your £191 buys you a fantastically capable netbook. We hope that any minor wrinkles, such as Linpus’ codec support, will be ironed out by the time production units are available, but for now, the Aspire one wins a well-deserved Recommended award.