Review: Acer Aspire One
Linked by Eugenia Loli on Fri 31st Oct 2008 08:46 UTC
Hardware, Embedded Systems Geeks.com, known for their cheap laptops, sent us the Acer Aspire One for a review. Thom wrote a review of the popular laptop recently, but here's my take on it. Update: After this review went up, and within two hours, I installed Ubuntu 8.10 (time is 4:10 AM here, couldn't sleep until I had Ubuntu in there). Using this very nice tutorial, I have everything up and running.
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Comment by moleskine
by moleskine on Fri 31st Oct 2008 11:50 UTC
moleskine
Member since:
2005-11-05

A lot of folks seem to think the Acer netbooks are the pick of the bunch. And if I were to get one, I'd probably get an Acer too. But I'm not really tempted. At the moment, the whole netbook thang strikes me as too much a product (the Atom chipset) in search of a market. Spending some more (but a lot less than the cost of an Apple laptop) will get me a fully loaded but still eminently portable gizmo like the Samsung Q210 series of 12-inchers. This will do far, far more and probably last a lot longer too. And there are plenty of less expensive but well specified and still portable laptops from Acer themselves as well as from downmarket "value" brands.

Netbooks have flagged up one thing, though. If the makers can get these netbooks in at their current prices, then how come so many mobile smartphones are astronomically expensive by comparison? Where I live, some of the more recent Windows 6-7 smartphones cost 50-100 per cent more than a netbook. Maybe an unintended consequence of the netbook phenomenon is that mobile makers will be forced to come back down to earth.

Edited 2008-10-31 11:51 UTC

Reply Score: 3

RE: Comment by moleskine
by iphitus on Sat 1st Nov 2008 13:35 in reply to "Comment by moleskine"
iphitus Member since:
2006-03-27

Product in search of a market? There's definitely multiple markets. Here's at least one...

Students.

I've see so many of these "netbooks" around the campus and I'm planning to get one myself. Their size and mass makes them ideal. 12.1" laptops tend to be expensive, and anything bigger than that tends to be too big or heavy to be conveniently carried around frequently. My 12.1" is just slightly shorter than an A4 page... and people used to think it was tiny.

The price is affordable and young people tend to be able to find disposable income for this sort of thing. 2 weeks pay vs 6 months pay. Both do internet, word processing and most other tasks a student will need a computer for.

Reply Parent Score: 1

RE[2]: Comment by moleskine
by moleskine on Sat 1st Nov 2008 20:18 in reply to "RE: Comment by moleskine"
moleskine Member since:
2005-11-05

Interesting, as I live in a student town (around 30,000 of them in term time). To my surprise I've so far seen hardly any netbooks in the cafes and wifi places, and the ones I have seen have all been with folks who did not look like students. Mostly I see Dells and the smaller Macbooks among the students. This is in the UK, though. I guess it's possible the students are given recommendations or requirements about the kind of laptops they are expected to have. The other gizmo I see a lot of is the iPhone, often in the hands of those whose parents must be paying the monthly bill. I wonder whether a lot of folks have decided to pass by netbooks and centralize stuff on their phone, using full notebooks for academe or work. Or, they are lucky to have wealthy and generous parents ...

Reply Parent Score: 2