Acer Aspire One £170.34… bargain
Netbooks should be cheap, they should work and they should be portable. Unfortunately the Elonex ONE only ticked the first and the last (marginally) of those options. They worked towards an unachievable target of launching the first sub £100 (roughly $150) notebook in the UK (£110 with posting and packaging). With a processor similar to one you’d find in a smartphone it could barely keep up with text being inputted through the keyboard. Which meant it wasn’t a netbook, notebook or laptop, instead, it was a brick.
What a difference £60 makes. We couldn’t resist the Acer Aspire One with an Intel Atom processor, the basic model (A110-Ab) is just £170.34 (delivered) at Amazon UK. It doesn’t have the best specifications compared with other netbooks currently available, but it costs considerably less.
We opted for the blue version and decided to install Windows XP immediately using an external DVD drive. Considering the machine only has 512MB RAM and an Intel Atom processor it runs exceptionally well. With this machine, upgrading to 1GB RAM requires taking apart the entire thing, which is far more hassle than it’s worth.
One of the perceived issues with this netbook is the 3-cell battery, although more and more netbooks are skimping on battery life, early netbooks came 5-cell standard. When you open the box, you’ll notice how extremely small and thin the battery is, this reduces the overall weight of the laptop. We’ve been using it for over 2 hours using the processor intensively and the gauge states it has over an hour left.
Because of the small battery and light materials the overall weight of this machine is incredible. Yes it feels a little plasticy, but all netbooks feel plasticy (unless you spend over £400) so you might as well enjoy the benefits of plastic.
The Linux installation that came with the device as default was great, but most people will find Windows more comforting and issue free. Overall, this is an excellent machine, the main downsides are the squashed trackpad and the default 512MB RAM (1GB would be perfect).
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how does this compare against other netbooks you have tested?
The Acer Aspire One does definitely need 1GB RAM, the Asus Eee 900 probably has a better mouse, but it also has a smaller keyboard, however it is less wide. A comparison coming soon, possibly. Thanks.
[...] Sony has been selling supercharged netbooks for years now, they dominated the ultra-portable market with their ultra-expensive high quality laptops until recently, as nearly all their competitors have heavily undercut them with far less expensive (and less powerful) laptops, namely ‘Netbooks’ (Such as the Acer Aspire One). [...]