More USB Than a M1330
A normal smattering of ports are available on the Aspire One. There are three USB 2.0 (one more than my M1330!), a VGA out, a headphone/speaker out and a mic port.
There’s no ExpressCard or PCMCIA slot, but there is an open mini-PCI port for a WWAN card under the removable bottom panel. Unfortunately the SIM card slot behind the battery has been filled in, preventing the use of WWAN service. I gather Acer is planning a WWAN-enabled version down the road and didn’t want anything cannibalizing sales of that model.
Connectivity
The only wireless available with the system is a standard 802.11b/g card from Atheros (AR5007EG).
There is no built in Bluetooth, but it can be added with some hacking around with the laptop. You’ll have to open it up completely. You can find out more about that procedure over here, at tnkgrl.
Small Doesn’t Mean Efficient
At full charge the 3 cell battery provides an anemic 23Wh of power. By comparison the 6 cell battery of my M1330 is 57Wh. So even for a 3 cell, the battery of the Aspire One is pretty lousy. Taking half the charge of that 6 cell would still give over 28Wh, or over 20% more power. On the other hand, the 3 cell is impressively small. A 6 cell battery is also available, but juts out the back. That battery essentially doubles battery life so may very be worth it for those away from a power plug for extended periods of time. I’ve always felt that battery life is one of the most important characteristics of the netbook category, but with the 3 cell batteries popping up in the likes of the Aspire One and MSI Wind, it seems like manufacturers don’t quite view autonomy in the same light.
The following are some power consumption numbers for both Windows XP and Vista (running Aero).
XP
- Max Battery, lowest brightness (which is still decent) with Wifi on and connected – 7.8W – 2:57
- Max Battery, max brightness Wifi on and connected – 9.5W – 2:25
- Surfing, max brightness – 11.5W – 2:00
As I normally do to try and conserve some battery life, I tried disabling unused hardware, such as the webcam. The weird thing is, power consumption actually went up by 1W. It was reproducible and quite consistent.
Vista
- Power Saver, Aero enabled, lowest brightness, Wifi on and connected – 8.1W – 2:50
- Surfing, max brightness – 12.0W – 1:55
As you can see, the battery life is pretty abysmal, short of simply staring at the notebook for 3 hours. On the other hand, there isn’t a significant difference in battery life between Windows XP and Vista.
I want to say this is a poor showing, but in all honesty, there are plenty of netbooks out there that do just as poorly if not worse, such as the 3-cell MSI Wind. I won’t even mention the multitude of full-size budget notebooks that do horrible in battery life tests. Versions of the Aspire One with built-in flash memory in place of the 120GB hard drive may fare better in power consumption tests as well.
Netbooks – Know When They’re Useful
Let’s wrap things up. The Acer Aspire One is possibly one of the most attractive netbooks at first glance due to its bargain price. However, after a fairly thorough analysis, I’ve come to the conclusion that the deal doesn’t come without baggage. You have the mediocre (at best) battery life, awkward bilingual keyboard if you’re an English Canadian, and a heck of a lot of noise.
If you understand and accept the shortfalls for what they are, you should be more than pleased with the Aspire One. In the context of netbooks, all too often you hear people saying, ‘but for that price, I can get a much more powerful laptop’. However, it gets a bit easier to swallow at the $400 or so price you’ll find the Aspire One well equipped at. Plus, those more powerful, but full-size laptops are no where near as portable as an Aspire One, and that’s really what you’re buying. If you want a mobile HD studio, skip the netbook. On the other hand, I absolutely cringe at the sight of $600 Eee 1000’s and MSI Winds. Sure you’ll get a laptop that gets better battery life, but they also get quite close to the price, weight and size range of a budget 13.3” laptop. (Case in point, the Dell Inspiron 13 is now $599CAD.) Don’t even get me started on the netbook-that’s-not-a-netbook, ASUS N10. That’s really another article for another time.
Pros:
- Physically small
- Well priced
- Decent-size keys
- Doesn’t look like a toy
- Lightweight, even compared to other 8.9” netbooks
- Powerful enough to run Vista smoothly
Cons
- It’s a noisy bugger
- Bilingual keyboard layout
- Trackpad button layout, and more importantly button design
- Relatively poor battery life
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.