Design
It’s small. There’s no doubt about that. While larger than the Eee 700 that started it all, the Aspire One is at the same time smaller than new generation of 8.9” and 10.2” Atom-based netbooks.
With the dark blue color scheme, it doesn’t look like a MacBook-wannabe that many other netbooks do and presents a fairly business-like image. It certainly doesn’t look like a toy and I wouldn’t be ashamed of showing up in a meeting room with one.
The white version sure looks Macbook-y doesn’t it?
Upon first inspection, you might almost conclude that two different teams designed the chassis and lid. The lid is an example of glossiness overdone in my opinion, with a glossy lid back, glossy bezel, and reflective display. The chassis uses no gloss at all, with matte keys and a smooth, but understated palmrest and touchpad.
Cheap, but not Cheap
The entire laptop is manufactured with plastic; fortunately, the plastic used is relatively thick and robust. The bottom of the chassis is solid and the small palm rests flex very little. Especially impressive is the LCD panel. It is build very strongly, significantly better than my M1330’s lid, which granted, isn’t the strongest panel design. I was unable to produce any ripples in the LCD with any reasonable amount of force.
In part due to its small size, you can pick up the Aspire One almost any way you want from any corner and there will be no squeaks groans or other sense of plastic fatigue. I have absolutely no fear for it in my bag along with books and other gadgets.
The screen hinges are nice and tight. Opening the laptop is a two-handed affair. The battery fits flush and there is absolutely no wiggle room. Again, this is very impressive for such a cheap computer, especially when more expensive ones are running into quality issues.
Small But Usable Screen
The Aspire One is outfitted with an LED back-lit 8.9” WSVGA widescreen with a resolution of 1024×600, which is quite typical for netbooks, although the HP Mini-Note certainly steps it up a notch with a 1280×768 resolution. LED-backlighting is very popular with netbooks as it keeps weight and power consumption down and allows the panels to be slightly thinner. This sample came with no dead pixels.
The backlight doesn’t get particularly dark but brightest level is more than adequate for all but direct sunlight and bright lights from a source from behind. There is minimal backlight bleed and there are no backlight unevenness issues.
Speaking of light sources from behind, reflections are a problem. The screen is quite glossy and with a direct light source shining into it, the view is painful on the eyes, due to constant refocusing between the reflection and the image on the screen. My XPS M1330 also has a glossy screen, but doesn’t seem to have the same issue with reflections as the Aspire One.
Horizontal viewing angles are pretty good, but vertical viewing angles are relatively poor, with color shifting at anything more than +-30 degrees from the center line. As a netbook, it’ll be relatively rare for multiple to be sharing the display, so for more use cases, the slightly more limiting viewing angles won’t be an issue.
‘To Avoid Disturbing Others, Please Use Headphones With All Electronic Devices’
The speakers are in a word, poor. This is a netbook we’re talking about here, and any listening I’m going to be doing will be through headphones. Do yourself a favor and don’t use the speakers. Really, for other peoples’ sake if nothing else.
The right click is not mandatory on the touchpad. There is the key between the alt-car and ctrl which can be used almost all the time, in fact, all the time, if you plan it and get used to highlighting the icon/word/etc (setting the touchpad/mouse settings to highlight when pointer is over and single click open/run.
How much free space is on the hard drive? How much memory is left after XP loads?
I can’t recall exactly, but there’s a small restore partition on the machine, and aside from that, it’s just the OS. You’re probably looking at ~90GB of space free.
As for memory, I didn’t look in XP, but under Vista, after the system loaded, there was still about 500MB of free memory.
Does the Aspire ONE have a CD/DVD drive?
I have had an Aspire one for about 4 months, I bought an aftermarket 9 cell battery out of China (Ebay) for $80 – free shipping. My Aspire One is now quite a bit heavier but runs playing movies for a full six hours. When fully charged Windows estimates (don’t know how accurate windows estimates are) 6.5 to 7.5 hours of run time. The keyboard is my only complaint, the bilingual keyboard is difficult to use for us english typing Canadians, you can now buy a replacment english only keyboard on EBay as well but this would drive the price way too high for overall cost after the battery and keyboard. Portability is great, very nice little machine for travel/school etc.
The wifi functionality of the Aspire One is terrible. You can find hundreds of complains about this online. I tried to return my laptop after 3 weeks of ownership and Acer has refused to acknowledge that this is a major and extremely common defect and would not take it back. Everything else about the computer was fine but I won’t buy another Acer product ever again. My advice: Don’t buy this product or any other Acer until they fix the bugs.
The Acer Aspire One which I recently purchased has No wireless connectivity problems . You must expect this netbook to go above and beyond what it was designed for. By the way this little missive was penned from the dashboard of my car , using the wireless of the 7-11 I am parked in…
I love my Acer Aspire One. It’s Wifi works perfect, and it’s loaded with Windows XP and ubuntu. With ubuntu, wireless had problems and with the newest kernel Internet doesn’t work at all, but there’s a Wiki page on their site with many many fixes for it. Overall, it’s tons better than my old pieces of junk, and it’s actually lasted longer.
I bought an Acer Aspire One yesterday. I’m hoping to return it to Best Buy tomorrow.
When setting up, do not choose the default language “Canada: French/English” or everything will be in FRENCH!
I contacted Acer about the problem. They claim they ONLY fix is to purchase their Recovery CD. One small problem…the Aspire One does NOT have an optical (CD-R) drive. Acer suggests I also buy an external drive, so I can run their CD. The inexpensive choice is quickly becoming anexpensive choice!
Stay away from Acer.
Acer Aspire One was also in my list before, but I ended up with the new LGX110 which is a little bigger than the aspire one because I find the laptop really small for me and my big hands. Thanks for the information anyway, and I’d still love to have an Aspire One because it looks really nice.
Though it’s expensive it can be useful because of the specifications that are trendy and useful to those always on the go.
I wanted an Aspire One but chose the Toshiba NB 205 because of the keyboard. My large hands would not fit the other netbook keyboards. Thanks to everyone for your comments.
I purchased the 11.6 inch screen version from future shop.
No problems so far.
It pulls in week wireless signals alot better than my laptop does.
One feature not found on other netbooks is the power zoom on the touch pad.
Two fingers placed on the touch pad, spread your fingers and voila!…. blind people can read.
Battery life is acceptable with the three cell.
I would buy another one.