I went with four stars on this, but it would have been 4.5 if the option availed itself. In other words, I just had to put this slightly below perfect in order to be completely honest about my experience.
Let's talk about the perfection first: no fan noise on mine, great wireless reception, sharp screen, solid build, and great battery life. Even the little things, like a nice, long power cord really help out. Disk space is probably the most fun and impressive thing I have found so far.
That's just the start of why this little item is so wonderful. I have gone through several laptops and PDAs in my time. The laptops compromised on size (sometimes still to big), battery life, and price, while the PDAs compromised on size (sometimes still too small) and functionality. I have used the Aspire One for two weeks now, at home, in the car, and at my in-law's house, and I can say it is a great balance. This is real Windows XP. No pared down operating system, no incompatible file types, no shortage of software, no non-standard storage or networking. It's a Windows computer in all senses of functionality, storage, and networking. It gets that right. It absolutely nails it for the first time in my computing experience.
Speed-wise it is about 40% as fast as my desktop here at work, a Pentium 4 3.4 Ghz machine. That is for pure CPU, I used a PI-generating benchmark to test. The standard 1 GB memory included appears to work fine. I kept OpenOffice, iTunes, and several Firefox windows open all weekend, and the machine handled it all well including hibernating. Boot times are amazing, about a minute for a full restart, less for a boot-up from a power-down situation. It all "just works" on that front. And incidentally, it didn't have much "crapware" at all from the start, which I really admire. I uninstalled McAfee and the Office trial, and that was about it. I was expecting to have to spend a whole evening uninstalling things and checking startup routines, but that all took just 30-40 minutues, including reboots.
So why not 5 stars? Simple ergonomics. The screen is small and the keyboard is small. I make more typos, and my eyes hurt after moderate use if I am not more careful to stare out and apply good optical ergonomics. Before you say, "duh, you knew what you were getting," you have to understand that 4 stars is a GREAT review. But if I am honest with myself about how long I could really sit down and work on this for something "real" like writing a novel or editing several web pages, it is not a perfect experience, not five stars.
However, here are things where the ergonomics matter less, and I would give five stars for these specific experiences with the Aspire One:
-- Casual web browsing. This thing is a fully functional, take-anywhere web kiosk with great battery life and plenty of disk space for downloads, etc.
-- Watching movies/videos. No, it doesn't have a DVD drive, but if you are sharing a video on a network or rip a DVD down to it from a shared DVD player (PLENTY of disk space, I love that!), you have yourself a wonderful little movie-watching machine.
-- Listening to music. Share that iTunes library or just copy files over and listen to your heart's content. The sound via headphones is quite acceptable. Again, the ample disk space is fantastic, and I was able to listen to music while writing and browsing without any hitches. NOTE: For wireless and cordless listening, you may want to turn off the power saving on the wireless network card in the advanced network settings. I got skips when trying to play from a shared iTunes library over the air before I did that, your mileage may vary.
-- Simply Sharing Life. Since you can easily transfer files to and from this little beauty, it is great for traveling with files, pictures, music, or videos. And the long battery life makes it easy to share and share long. The portability is great, and the fact that we are talking about full-blown Windows XP does away with any incompatibility issues you may have had with previous PDAs, cell phones, etc.
In summary, this is a solid 4.5 star device whose only drawback is the size you already knew you were in for. Keep those eyes healthy and stay relaxed while typing, and even that may not be an issue for you (hence all the five-star ratings here). The price is right, the disk space is ample, and the battery life is fantastic, all in a standard-OS gem.
Highly recommended.Get more detail about Acer Aspire One AOA150-1126 8.9-Inch Netbook - White.
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