Asus, watch your back. You've been coasting for a while on the Eee PC. Oh, sure, it's cheap and tiny, but you've got serious competition waiting in the wings. Acer provided us with a preview (preproduction) unit of the upcoming Aspire One, which may be priced as low as $400; and after kicking the tires for about a week, I'm ready to shed my high-end portable in favor ofa sub-$500 netbook (as some people call thisclass of basic mini-notebook).
Why the conversion? For starters, it's fairly light and lean (weighing2 pounds and measuring9.8by 6.7by 1.14 inches), yet it still manages to squeeze in Intel's 1.6-GHz Atom processor. Aside fromMSI's Wind, this is one of the first machinesto showoff how well Intel's bargain-priced CPU can perform.
In Video: Atomic Mini-Notebooks
And the Aspire One is fairly well constructed for a beta unit. The hard, candy-colored exterior is fairly polished and feels solid to the touch--certainly tough enough to withstand being tossed in your bag. And a huge, well-secured bezel keeps the 8.9-inch, 1024-by-600-pixel display in place.
Now, when I think of the average netbook, certainly ones in the $400 price range, the word that comes to mind is "compromise." You get Linpus Linux Lite, not Windows XP. You get OpenOffice.org instead of Microsoft Office. You get an 8GB hard drive and 512MB of RAM. It just doesn't sound like a great deal.
Then I used it. I was genuinely surprisedat the relatively smooth sailing (though I did runinto someWi-Fi issues) and at how much I like the keyboard. It's a great size and doesn't feel crunched up in order to hit a form factor.
We can't run WorldBench onthe Aspire One'stiny 8GB NAND hard drive, but I can tell you that it'll boot in 25 seconds. I had no problems streaming video from Youtube over an 802.11g connection (final hardware revisionsmayadd WiMax or 3G support). It played MP3s without a hitch and ran a 213MB WMV episode of Best Week Ever sans stutters.
Ah, but you need some more room to grow. Aside from the standard-issue USB ports, ethernet jack, and VGA out, the Aspire One comes with two storage card slots. Why two? One is tasked for "storage expansion"--pop in an SD card, andthe mini-note willformat the flash storage to serve as extra internal hard-drive space. The other slot serves the usual purpose: for files you want to transfer from a digital camera orother deviceyou have on hand.
If you're not sold on the storage space--or on Linux, for that matter--Acer will also offera slightly pricier, XP-loaded flavor of the Aspire One (thoughthe companyhasn't revealed exact pricing, expectthis versionto cost around $600). It'll have an 80GB hard disk and 1GB of RAM.
I know I'm going out on a limb here, but this machine shows lots of promise. You could geta surprising amountof mileagefrom this PC whenproduction units ship (supposedly in September). Obviously, though, this is hardly a final review. Check back whenAcer releases the production versionfor ourupdated thoughts and tests.
--Darren Gladstone