Hardware Revolution

Introduction: For the last two months, I’ve been sick and tired! My current laptop, an Aspire 5610, is too powerful, too heavy (About 7 pounds) and has a too short battery lifespan (2 hours fully charged, with power-saving features on, although the battery has some wear.) and I only use my laptop to surf on the web, write on Hardware Revolution and listen to music/Dvds. When I go out for a whole day, it’s get uncomfortable to carry it due to its weight and I can’t use it much due to its short battery life.

So due to all the reasons above, I’ve been looking into buying a sub-notebook for about 2 months now and I’ve seen the Eee, on which I don’t think there’s enough storage(4 to 20GB?! Are you kidding me?!), the MSI Wind, which is great, but only available with the 3-cell battery until september (wait another 2 months?!) and it’s more expensive, at 499$. Well, now that Acer has entered the battleground, let’s see what they have to offer!

Acer is the next manufcturer to deliver a compact notebook with a price under 400$: The Aspire One can be bought either with a SSD Drive or a Mechanical hard drive, Linux or Windows as the operating system and 512MB or 1GB of memory(RAM).

The Aspire One is now available in 5 different configurations and 2 different colors, blue and silver right now, with black, pink and brown to be available later this year.

Available Configurations:
Linux, 3-cell battery, 512MB RAM, 8 GB SSD: 379$
Linux, 3-cell battery, 512MB RAM, 120 GB Hard Drive: 379$
Linux, 6-cell battery, 1GB RAM, 8GB SSD: 449$
Windows XP Home, 3-cell battery, 1GB RAM, 120 GB hard drive, 399$
Windows XP Home, 6-cell battery, 1GB RAM, 120 GB hard drive, 429$

The One measures 9.8″ x 6.7″ x 1.14″ and weighs about 2.2 pounds and it is a sub-notebook that is competing with similar-sized devices such as the ASUS Eee or the MSI Wind. The notebook’s stylish shell is built around an 8.9″ screen that delivers a resolution of 1024×600 pixels, which should be enough for the One’s key application areas - web browsing, checking email, instant messaging, VOIP calls, streaming video , viewing photos and listening to music. Acer said that a 3-cell battery delivers enough juice for about three hours of operating time. The 6-cell battery extends the running time to up to seven hours, according to the manufacturer.

All Acer One models are based on the standard Atom N270 1.6 GHz processor with Diamondville core. The choice of this processor is slightly strange, as the Silverthorne version (Atom Z530) is 25% more power efficient at a maximum power consumption of 2 watts compared to the 2.5 watts of the N270. I don’t know why Acer chose this chip, but I guess the decision may have been made due to price difference: While the N270 can be purchased for a tray price of $44, the Z530 is priced at $95 (including SCH chipset). It may have to do with Intel’s Atom shortage too. In any case, a 7 hours running time on a 6-cell battery is really sweet!

Other features of the One include Intel’s GMA950 graphics chipset, a 0.3 MP webcam, Ethernet, 802.11 b/g Wi-Fi, a media card reader and three USB 2.0 ports.

Conclusion: The One looks just lovely and it seems to be exactly what I’m looking for. The Windows Xp Home, with the 6-cell battery, 1GB of RAM and the 120GB, fits my requirements(Long battery life, it’s light and it’s has a lot of storage!) and my budget, as it’s only 429$!

I took a look on the net and they are starting to be available now or are on pre-order with a estimated time of arrival of two weeks! Nice! Acer, keep one for me, will ya? =)