The Acer Aspire ONE Review

Introduction

SPECIAL NOTE:

The following article will reference pictures that are not there. This is not an accidental omission on my part. I am in the process of buying a new camera, but I wanted to start getting reviews posted and get the site going without having to wait. Please be patient, and check back often as I will post when I get the camera, and let you know that the images are going to start coming. Thank you for your patience.

 

Review Specs:

Product Obtained – Purchased retail from Newegg. Purchased by friend, but on loan to me first to do review. As such, I only have a few days with the unit. This will be sufficient to cover what I feel is the integrity of the unit, and it’s overall functionality, but will not include detailed benches.

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The Acer Aspire ONE

So what exactly *is* a netbook these days?

Originally, the intention of the so called “netbook” was a low cost, low power, compromised version of a laptop to facilitate the use of the web and email in a very lightweight package. Early netbooks were tiny, used either very old versions of windows, or some even used the same Windows Mobile as smart phones. Others used versions of smart phone OS’s from other vendors.

But then smart phones became more powerful.

What is a netbook today?

If the Aspire ONE in front of me is any indication, it is nothing less than simply the most power you can cram into an 11.6” form factor, complete with a full Windows 7 experience and the ability to play some fairly resource heavy games. Should this even be called a “netbook” still? No. Not by my definition.

To me, the modern “netbook” would be something more like a Kindle, or maybe an iPad, but given that the price of this machine falls in line with those more limited platforms, recommendations start to become muddied.

As it is with all of my review material, my articles are more about an overall “perspective” on the product, its company, their support, and in some cases, the actual place of that product within the target market.

Does the Aspire and similar “netbooks” deserve your money more than an iPad or Kindle? That depends on what you plan to do with it, and how much you expect your gear to do. Let’s first take a look at the Aspire ONE from unboxing to use and then we’ll explore who should buy one.

The Unboxing

Acer has never been known for fancy packaging. Their stuff is midrange when it comes to sizzle. The box itself is fairly straightforward, and is protected by another outer box.

Unboxing is surprisingly collector friendly. If you like to keep your boxes for moving, this will do just fine. The box contains several layers of cardboard, and the netbook itself is wrapped in a cloth sheet.

Once free of the sheet, the screen is protected by both a plastic film, which I recommend you leave on for a while, and a cloth sheet covering the keyboard.

If you are going to set the computer upside down on your table, you can use this sheet to protect it.

Everything else is wrapped in plastic. Make sure you dig into the bottom, or you might miss the battery. Everything is so lightweight; you might not realize you’ve missed it!

What’s in the box

Acer Aspire ONE 721-3574 netbook

1 – battery

1 – A/C adapter in two parts

1 - Manual

Overview of the Main Hardware

First impressions

In my lab, I tend to think pretty big. I have some serious iron when it comes to computing.

My main machine is a six core powered desktop inside a Corsair 800D case. My main laptop is the 12lb Alienware M17x. I have two 24” monitors. Heck, my vehicle is a Ford Expedition.

To say that this netbook looks out of place would be a massive understatement, but is also an extremely telling commentary on how well wrought a little package this is.

At only an 11.6” screen size, it’s dwarfed next to the Alienware, and yet, it looks up to that beast and proudly proclaims “Hey, I may weigh ¼ of what you do, but I can run games too!”

And so it can, but we’ll get into that down below. For now, let’s have a look at what we have here:

The netbook itself is covered in either a rough “carbon fiber” feel surface or a semi smooth “brushed aluminum” feel surface. There are no completely smooth surfaces, and this is in line with modern, high class hardware. You’ll hear me talk about “class” a lot in my reviews. It’s something important to me, and important to my readers.

The im”port”ent parts

Starting from the front: On the left side are the status lights, followed by the mouse buttons in the middle. That’s it.

On the right side, we find a memory card reader, headphone and mic ports, two USB ports, lock port, and Ethernet port.

The rear side contains only the sliding port area for the battery.

The left side contains a VGA port, presumably to support older projectors, the A/C port, an HDMI port, and another USB port.

Opening up

Coming from full size and curved keyboards and 17” laptops, this is culture shock to me. Sure, I’ve used plenty of tiny laptops before, but to be hit with this after day to day use of much larger hardware is still quite a shock to the system.

For a computer that only weighs as much as the A/C adapter of my Alienware, I don’t EXPECT much.

Specs

As shipped, this machine is equipped with:

• Form Factor - 11.6" netbook style
• CPU - AMD Athlon II Neo 1.7Ghz single core
• Chipset - AMD M880G
• RAM - 2GB upgradable to 4GB - This is a very important departure from older netbooks. For around $50, you can upgrade to a full 4GB kit, and have as much memory as most desktops.
• Storage - 250GB HDD
• Screen - 11.6" 1366x768 LED backlit screen
• GPU - AMD Radeon HD 4225 - with a respectable ability to render modern games. See below.
• OS - Windows 7 Home Premium x64

A very thorough and nice feature set for such a tiny package.

Restore

One thing I would like to see here is some form of external restore capability. The machine comes with a utility to create restore medium, but is it too much to ask manufacturers to include a small flash drive with the OS pre-loaded to assist in this process? It would go a long way toward lowering support costs, and would look good in the feature set.

The Tour

The first thing I notice is that the trackpad is TINY. You’re going to want to bring a mouse. This adds to the bulk of course, but this is part of the tradeoff of such a tiny form factor. Likewise, the keyboard is extremely small, but that’s to be expected. No backlight either, but that’s sort of a matter of taste. I’m used to having it on my Alienware, and it’s nice to have if you’re in the dark.

The Keyboard

The keys themselves are very flush, all black, and mostly featureless. While this looks classy in the light, it can be a pain in the dark. With no lights you cannot see the specific function keys, and I pity the fool who accidently triggers the numlock. The right half of your keyboard turns schizo and unless you can find the right key again, you’re going to be typing a lot o4 6eubers.

The function keys for brightness, always important in a laptop, are actually the arrow keys down in the right corner. Easy to miss that at first if you’re used to the more traditional F3 and F4, but easier to find in the dark, so that’s a nice tradeoff.

The Screen

I’m spoiled by the screen on my Alienware. That thing is amazingly bright, and amazingly beautiful. It’s a better looking screen than my two Samsung desktop screens, one of which is a brand new LED unit. So judging any screen now has to be compared to that.

The screen on the Acer is quite bright for its size. By default, it will go too dim on battery. Now I don’t know about you, but I’m a stickler for brightness on a screen. I don’t want to have to squint at the screen, especially when watching videos. The first thing I did was set up the power plans to essentially max. On max settings, it’s really quite pleasing and clear. Not as bright as the other screens, but plenty enough for daytime use in an airport terminal. I did not do any traveling in the few days I had the unit, nor would I have taken it, but I imagine that it would be quite accommodating in those circumstances.

The Autopsy

Not my unit = No dissection today. Sorry.

The webcam

I don’t have a lot of time to test this, but first impressions are that the cam is quite bright and clear. It lacks the built in light that the Alienware has, but it does a good enough job gathering available light.

I would say that the camera is perfectly good for daily use, if you wish to do that sort of thing ;) I would post pics of me, but I’m pathologically camera shy.

Life with Junior

Video Playback

Video comes in many, MANY flavors these days. There’s flash, Youtube, Hulu, Netflix, and other services and homebrewed encodings usually in the Matroska container these days.

Normal resolution videos from each provider played smoothly. No problems there, but that’s to be expected. Where things became complicated was in trying to play so-called HD video.

For the purposes of my reviews, and I may do an entire primer on this later, “HD” must refer to one of two accepted resolutions:

1280x720 or

1920x1080

In the case of 720p video in Matroska was smooth. 1080p was a sheer no go. The system just can’t keep up. Being single core here really starts to show.

As a final test, I used wifi to stream 540p and 720p videos back to back for my battery test . . .

Battery Test

For my quick battery test, I decided to force the laptop into full power mode, full brightness, full time use of wifi, background tasks, and non-stop playback of streamed video from my desktop. In this case, .mkv files streamed at either 540p or 720p with a web browser with several tabs open, and yahoo mail checking mail periodically.

Under these conditions, the computer held strong for three solid hours, pretty much on the dot.

Wifi

Without extensive time to test, I can only say that from the exact same spot, the Acer had only one bar of wifi signal to the Alienware’s full bars. This didn’t stop it from streaming the videos without buffering, but it’s something to take note of.

Gaming Benchmarks

As I said earlier, this little machine refuses to believe it’s not a gaming computer. So because it insisted, I installed various benchmarking apps and games. Here is a brief overview of the results, truncated again due to very limited time with the machine:

3Dmark 06 – 1200

3Dmark Vantage Entry – 1200ish

World of Warcraft is playable at native resolution, with most details turned to LOW, and running around Gilneas on a Worgen showed a consistent 30fps. Perfectly playable.

Half Life 2 was also playable at native resolution with some settings lowered to Medium.

Bioshock was not playable, but further optimization would bring it up to being so. It was close.

Oblivion was arguably not playable. It was really slow.

Torchlight was playable on netbook mode with details turned down. Still very slightly choppy, but playable.

I did not have time for any others.

Gaming on the Aspire? Heck yeah!! The screen is beautiful, and many games are quite playable so long as you check your expectations. To be able to play most modern PC games at ALL on a 3lb, $400 netbook is extremely impressive.

The future of Gaming on Netbooks

This is a segment I’m going to be watching closely. With Sandy Bridge and Fusion just around the corner I’m anticipating a flood of new sub 15” notebooks with much more potent gaming capabilities in the $500 and 4lb range. With the Alienware M11x being the only real 11.6” gaming notebook, and being from a company you absolutely cannot trust ( more on that in another article, but Dell/Alienware epically fails my Integrity Check ), it will be extremely pleasing to finally see some real competition in this segment. I’m hoping to be in on some of the launches for these miniscule muscle books.

Issues?

No hardware failures, but some gotcha’s you might want to keep in mind:

You absolutely must have a notebook mouse to use here. The trackpad is just too small and too touchy for daily use.

Either install your own OS or spend some time de-bloatwaring. The sheer amount of BRANDING on this thing is obnoxious, and does not lend itself to my definition of class. We GET IT, it’s an Acer!!! Get over yourselves.

Conclusion

There really aren’t many choices at this price point, and at this form factor. You could choose an Asus eee 10.1” with an Atom, 1GB of memory, and a potentially shaky reputation ( we have an Asus eee 900 in the lab that I had to solder a new bios for, because they are notoriously unstable, and the screen is extremely dim. It’s a computer that I’m repairing for a friend, but after a lot of research, I’m not confident in eee’s. Asus: You are welcome to send me one or two to prove me wrong ) for a few dollars less, or you could spend an additional $130 for a Lenovo ThinkPad X100e with similar specs, but until I have one of those in hand, I will not comment on whether that is a wise choice.

For your $400, it’s hard to go wrong. This is a well-wrought, classy ( with the exception of all that OS branding ), fast, stable, and gaming capable machine.

If you absolutely MUST have a new netbook now, and don’t want to or cannot wait for next month, get it.

Integrity Check

As this is a brand new paradigm in product reviews, I will take a moment to explain the logic behind it in each of my early reviews.

This is how it works:

For my site, my keystone paradigm is “Integrity”. It governs everything that I do. I do not “scoop”, I do not “spy”, nor will I purchase stolen hardware, or less serious but still crappy behavior such as copying content, posting something on my site as if it was my content, with a “via-“ link. There is no via ANYthing on my site. 100% of all of my content is generated by me. Period.

On that same token, I have certain standards for vendors. It has been my long experience that vendors will treat their reviewers equal to how they treat their customers. The only difference between a professional reviewer and an end user is that reviewers don’t pay for the product. However, we still, or at least, I still expect a certain degree of support, communication, acceptance of feedback, and level of behavioral conduct.

As part of this process, I will detail my dealings with each company from first contact, product acquisition, support, and follow up. Exceptional companies will gain a lot of credit here, and the poorly run, greedy, or otherwise “less thans” will be outed.

Acer

I did not purchase this computer, nor did I get it as an “official” review unit, but regardless, I have no current issue with Acer. You guys are welcome to send me netbooks, monitors, and whatever else you wish to have reviewed. I’m looking forward to what you do with Sandy Bridge. An Aspire ONE type netbook with a Sandy Bridge might just find a permanent home in my test lab.

Conclusion

Today we looked at the Acer Aspire ONE 721-3574 “netbook” class laptop. This little three pound puppy proved worthy to stand next to the beastly Alienware M17x, an unarguably powerful laptop, but with a very storied and shaky history. The Aspire doesn’t really excel in gaming, but for a laptop not even MARKETED as a gaming machine it does the job very well. If you’re a gamer in need of a super lightweight traveler, this is the best form factor to go with barring the caveats noted in the bechmarks above.

Remember that this is a $400, 3lb machine. This is the perspective we must take home.

If you’re not a gamer, the Radeon 4225 video is touted as being able to smoothly facilitate Blu Ray playback. I do not have an external Blu player here, so I couldn’t test that aspect. It will play most video formats just fine.

Typing and mousing tasks will take some getting used to, but you can always add a travel mouse.

Until Sandy Bridge comes along, this is a no brainer.

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