Brian Jarvis, UMPC Geek

After a couple of weeks without my netbook, I’m back in the saddle! I sent the unit off for repair after a mysterious failure just a bit over two weeks ago. On Monday afternoon, I received my Aspire One back from Acer functioning like nothing ever happened. I was pretty concerned about getting warranty support since I had opened the device to upgrade the RAM (which validates the warranty, I am sure), but they didn’t ask and I didn’t tell.

Many thanks to the people who contacted me offering support suggestions on breathing some life back into my computer. In the end, Acer ended up replacing the motherboard though, so in my case it was a hardware failure. I wish I knew what caused the problem though. If it was something that I did I would like to avoid repeating the mistake (the netbook was plugged into an iGo universal power adapter when it died last time).

By the way, the very first thing I did when I got the unit back was to open it back up and upgrade the RAM again. Am I tempting fate?   :^)

About an hour ago, I went to boot off my USB drive and miss3d the timing, so I held down the power button to interupt the Windows Vista Boot.  Then I tried rebooting and my Aspire wouldn’t respond.  It just sits at a black screen with the fan spinning, but no life.  I have tried an external monitor, replacement hard drive, changing out the memory, and even swearing at it (well, not really) but nothing makes a difference.  I seem to have an Acer Aspire Brick instead of an Aspire One.

I will attempt a call to technical support later, but I have very low hopes of their ability to help (shhh… don’t tell them I’ve had it open for upgrading the RAM).

I had previously posted about a Classmate PC that I was borrowing from work for a short time.  I returned it yesterday after having gone a couple of weeks without touching it.  Before checking it back in, I powered it back up to make sure that I wasn’t leaving any personal data on it and the experience just reaffirmed my impressions of the Acer Aspire One being a far superior platform.  The keyboard on the Classmate is just not large enough for adult hands, the non-standard key placement just drove me crazy, and I like the widescreen format of the Aspire One.

The fact that I could barely pry the Classmate out of the hands of my kids is a testament to the fact that it is great device for its intended audience.  For non-touch typists with small hands, it’s a great device for authoring brief documents and doing some simple web research.  In all, I think it’s a great little computer, just not for me.

I’ve now owned the Acer Aspire One for almost three weeks and I have been capturing some of my experience with the device over that time. I have had a number of readers ask me for a full review though, so here it is. I have made no attempt at brevity and have included pictures where appropriate.

Tour of the Acer Aspire One
On the left side of the device, you find the power port, a VGA port, Ethernet connection, one USB port, and an SD card reader.

On the front of the device, the only feature is the hardware control switch for the wireless radio. The speakers are also in the front, but are located on the bottom edge so that they are not visible in this picture.

On the right side, the Aspire One has a Kensington-type lock hole, a multi card reader, two USB ports, a headphone jack, and a microphone jack.

The back of the unit features nothing but the battery so I have not included a picture. The bottom of the device features one removable panel, but interestingly enough, it does not open to reveal anything that is upgradeable. I have no idea what prompted the engineers at Acer to put it there.

Specifications (as it came from Acer’s product page - I have changed the wireless card and added some additional RAM)

Processor/speed: Intel Atom processor N270 (1.60 GHz, 533 MHz FSB, 512 KB L2 cache)
Chipset: Mobile Intel 945GSE Express Chipset
RAM: 512 MB onboard DDR2 533 MHz SDRAM single channel with onboard SDRAM and one soDIMM slot Upgradeable to 1 GB/1.5 GB using one 512 MB/1 GB soDIMM module
Video Subsystem: Integrated Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 950
Hard drive: 120GB 2.5″
Battery: 24 W 2200 mAh 3-cell Li-ion battery pack
Sound Subsystem: High-definition audio support, two built-in stereo speakers MS-Sound compatible, Built-in digital microphone
Storage Expansion: SD^TM Card reader and Multi-in-1 card reader: Supporting Secure Digital^TM (SD) Card, MultiMediaCard (MMC), Reduced-Size Multimedia Card (RS-MMC), Memory Stick® (MS), Memory Stick PRO^TM (MS PRO), xD-Picture Card^TM (xD)
Pointing Device: Touchpad
Peripheral Subsystem: 3 USB 2.0, 1 VGA, 1 Headphone/speaker/line-out jack 1 Microphone-in jack Integrated Acer Crystal Eye webcam, supporting 0.3 megapixel resolution
Wi-Fi: (dual-band quad-mode 802.11a/b/g/Draft-N) Wi-Fi CERTIFIED® network connection, featuring MIMO technology
LAN: 10/100 Mbps Fast Ethernet

Performance
There have been a number of features about the Apsire One that have pleasantly surprised me, but none has done so more than the performance of this little system. The Intel Atom processor inside the device is perfectly capable of carrying out the everyday tasks that people use laptop computers for: email, web, document reviewing/editing, music, videos, etc. With the 1.5 GB of RAM that I have installed, I never find myself waiting on the Aspire One. It is true that applications don’t open as fast as they do on my gaming system, but the delay is completely acceptable. Admittedly, Pixar is not going to be using an Aspire One to render their next blockbuster hit, but this device is plenty capable for 99% of what the average user does every day (and I don’t even know that the other 1% would be).

Keyboard and touchpad
The keyboard was a very important decision criteria for me when I was making my netbook decision. I was fortunate enough to be able to spend some time with several netbooks before I purchased this one and the Aspire One has the best keyboard by far (I have heard very good things about the MSI Wind keyboard as well, but haven’t had a chance to try one yet). All of the keys are appropriately placed and the size is close enough to 100% that I am able to touch type without any issues at all. This luxury is an extension of the wide screen format and the thick bezel around the display which provides more room on the chassis than other 8.9″ screens without the bezel.

The keys themselves are a bit softer than the keys on my Lenovo T61, but have about the same travel. I was pleasantly surprised to find that I can type on it for extended periods without any discomfort and I don’t suffer from a reduction in speed or accuracy. Overall, I am very pleased with the keyboard on the device.

I have written a full post about the touchpad on this device and will not repeat that content here other than to say there has been a lot written about the less-than-conventional design, but I got used to it in about 10 seconds.  Read more here.

Screen
The LED backlit screen on the Aspire One is very pleasant to use. It is incredibly sharp and more than bright enough. I find that if I am working in a darkened room, I have to turn the display brightness down most of the way because it is just too bright in these conditions. The saturation is excellent, but I have noticed that I have to have the screen angle adjusted correctly to get full saturation. It seems that the vertical viewing angle is not as large as the horizontal.

The screen is a glossy screen and some people do not care for that option. I personally love it as I think that the colors they produce are superior. The only time the glossy screen bothers me at all is when I am working outside in direct sunlight and can see myself in the reflection. This is easy enough to overcome by focusing on the document instead of the reflection, but it is something I notice once in a while.

I think the resolution choice was a brilliant design decision. The 1024 horizontal pixels are perfect for viewing web sites without being too wide. The 600 vertical pixels are adequate for most everythingm but I find myself doing a lot of scrolling in longer documents and web pages.  I prefer to use full screen mode or  minimal toolbars  when possible to make the most use of vertical screen real estate. I have not felt the need to hide the taskbar though - a sign of good balance to me.

Connectivity and wireless
The wireless performance of the Aspire One is rock solid. I am able to get a wireless signal anywhere my other laptop can and have never had any issues with the network dropping out. The only issue with the wireless hardware is the switch for enabling and disabling wireless seems a bit cheap to me. It uses a slider that doesn’t provide enough feedback to the user and feels like you could break it without trying too hard.

This device does not currently come with a Bluetooth option from Acer. There is a hardware mod from tnkgrl that will add this functionality, but I’m not personally interested because I never use Bluetooth. I suppose that it would be nice to be able to link up a phone or PDA with the Aspire One via Bluetooth, but my experience is that Bluetooth is too slow, so I use a USB cable for that purpose. This was not a deal breaker for me when I was making my purchase decision, but individual preference varies here.

Audio
The speakers on the unit work better than I feared they would. I played with an Aspire One at both Best Buy and Circuit City before I purchased mine and was concerned that the speakers were underpowered. The truth is…they are, but not by as much as I thought. The gold standard for mobile speakers for me is the performance I get out of my Samsung Q1 . That UMPC has the ability to be used as a mobile jukebox because the sound is loud and surprisingly clear. The Aspire One, well…not so much. The speakers are adequate for some background music, system feedback, YouTube videos, etc, but you aren’t going to be hosting any block parties with this device.

There is a headphone jack that produces excellent sound and a microphone jack that I assume works (I keep meaning to test that). I prefer to use the headphone jack for listening to music while I work and have even hooked it up to the stereo in my car for listening to some music while I waited for my son’s football practice to finish.

Heat and noise
Here comes by biggest gripe about the Aspire One: Out of the box, the #&@!% system fan runs all of the time and it is high pitched enough to drive a person absolutely insane when working in a quiet environment. I thought that perhaps I had a faulty unit and even called Acer about the issue. I was told (by someone obviously very new by the number of times she had to put me on hold), that “the fan just runs a little louder on the Aspire One.”

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not going to wake the neighbors or anything. I don’t even hear it when I am working in front of the television or if there is ambient noise at all. That changes when I work somewhere really quiet though and I become hyper aware of the noise the fan creates. It runs about as loud as the fan on my Lenovo, but the pitch is just annoying enough that I had to do something about it.

Thank heavens for the efforts of the developer(s) at Computersystems who wrote an application that overrides the system fan control. It basically allows you to set the temperature at which the fan should come on and shut off at. When I set the fan to come on at 64 degrees and to turn back off at 57 degrees, I find that it behaves very nicely and most of the time the fan stays off. The device doesn’t really heat up at these settings and it has become my standard working environment. The thing that drives me nuts is that Acer could easily change the BIOS to provide this experience for everyone and for the life of me, I can’t figure out why they haven’t.

Battery Life
I purchased the Aspire One with the 3 cell battery and honestly, it’s not quite enough. I wish I would have purchased the 6 cell device because I will end up purchasing the larger capacity battery anyway. The battery life with my setup is just more than two hours and the four plus hours a 6 cell battery would provide would make the device more usable. It is nice that my system is so light, but I would personally trade that for battery life in an instant.

Conclusion
So there you have it. I absolutely love this netbook and I am using it more than I thought I would. It is a perfect solution for getting work done while on the go or while sitting on the sofa at home. It is plenty capable of the everyday usage scenarios that most of us use computers for every day and it is a joy to use. After having played with several sub-notebooks and a handful of different netbooks, the Acer Aspire One is very high on my recommended list.

Pros
Performance is surprisingly good
Screen is bright and very usable
Keyboard is among the best available for touch typists
The portability of the Apsire One is fantastic

Cons
Wireless hardware switch is cheap
Poor battery life at around 2 hours with 3 cell battery
Loud cooling fan requires 3rd party app to control

When it comes to netbooks, there is no shortage of options to choose from. Most of those choices are centered around what hardware to choose, but there is also a choice to be made regarding which operating system will run on the device. Even after the purchase, there are a variety of aftermarket options that people use. I have been playing with some of these options and decided to write up my experience here.

Ubuntu
I was a Linux admin for about two years at Intel and can honestly say that I love Linux. That doesn’t mean that I use it every day though - mostly because the OS lacks the polish of most modern operating systems. It is very capable, more secure than anything else, and way more adaptable - I just don’t think it is ready for the masses. How much would Apple mock Microsoft if the directions to enable the wireless on your system was open a command window and type the following:

mkdir source
cd source
wget http://snapshots.madwifi.org/madwifi-hal-0.10.5.6/madwifi-hal-0.10.5.6-r3835-20080801.tar.gz
tar -xzvf madwifi-hal-0.10.5.6-r3835-20080801.tar.gz
cd madwifi-hal-0.10.5.6-r3835-20080801
sudo apt-get install build-essential linux-headers-$(uname -r)
make
sudo make install
sudo modprobe ath_pci

There would be commercials poking at that for years, nonetheless, these are the directions for getting the wireless card to work in Ubuntu on the Aspire One. It works, but it sure isn’t pretty!

All criticism aside, Ubuntu is my favorite Linux distribution by far. It is the easiest to install, has an amazing community, and takes less configuration than many other distros. I have very high hopes for it in the future, but just don’t think that it’s ready for prime time. It makes me wonder if a Linpus experience would have been better, but I have used it in the past and was not very impressed. I just don’t see any Linux distribution being used by non-techies any time in the near future.

OS X
I installed a Hacintosh version of OS X on my Aspire One just to play with it some. My limited experience with OS X has been on huge cinema displays at one of the Universities I attended and I wanted to see what it would be like on a small screen. It turns out the small screen experience is not the best.

When UMPC’s first came out, Windows didn’t know how to handle the lower resolution screens and OS X is struggling with the same problem today. There were a number of the configuration windows and a few applications that were too tall for the Aspire One’s 600 pixel high display. It was frustrating to not be able to click a critical button or read what was somewhere below the bottom bezel of my netbook.

Click on image for full resolutoin

It is too bad that it didn’t work though, because the operating system had promise otherwise. The system was quite snappy at its command and things worked quite well aside from a problem with my audio (that I didn’t take the time and energy to resolve). I really enjoy using Leopard with all of its eye candy like window animations and animated progress bars.

I realize that due to Apple’s screwed up EULA, it isn’t legally an option as an operating system on an Acer system. I’m sorry Apple (or any other ISV), if I legally purchase your software, I’m going to install it where I want. That is a whole different animal though and I will debate the merits and future of digital rights another day.   :^)

Windows XP
Next up is the operating system that came installed on my Aspire One - Windows XP Home Edition. I have to say that this OS seems to be best suited for the capability of the system and provides the best user experience out of the box. Sorry Apple fan boys, but it “just worked.” It seems to walk the line between performance and features better than the other options and is an excellent choice by the people at Acer. Since it’s not my winning vote though, that’s all I’m going to write about Windows XP on the Aspire One at this time.

Windows Vista
That leaves one mainstream OS that I haven’t already covered - Windows Vista. I have to remind everyone that I have upgraded the RAM on my netbook to 1.5GB, so I cannot speak to the experience with less RAM than that. I am quite pleased with how well it works though. I love the added features of Vista like folders giving you a preview of the contents, the animation of the windows, the built-in searching functionality, automatic file backups, and all of the interface touches like Aero (which runs very nicely on the Aspire One). I have been using Vista since its release and never had any compatibility issues, stability issues, or security concerns. I don’t mean to turn this into a post about Vista, so I will leave this issue by saying that I have never understood all of the bad press that Vista receives.

Click on image for full resolution

The performance on Vista very comparable to XP, but there is one area where it performs much better. I have been amazed that the time to standby is only about 3 seconds and resuming is the same (one caveat on all operating systems is that the more you have running, the longer standby/sleep/whatever takes). This nearly instant-on access is a dream come true for a device that gets carried around as much as a netbook does.

Conclusion
The geek in me has had an absolute blast playing with these different operating systems. The reality is that there is a professional in me that pays the bills though, and it’s time to stop playing with the Aspire One and start working with it. I bought the unit so that I could make better use of my mobile computing time and for that reason, I’m sticking with Windows Vista for now.

I enjoy using Windows Vista and am comfortable with it. If I switched to something dramatically different, I would have to spend time and money finding replacement applications for things I already do in Windows (yeah, good luck getting Visual Studio to run under WINE in Linux). The reality is that I’m not going to be doing that at this time. Vista runs great, works great, and helps me get everything done that I need to do. So for now, that’s what stays on the Aspire One. Who knows, maybe next week I’ll change my mind.    :^)

Yesterday, I made a Ghost image of my Aspire One hard drive and today I did a little surgery on the device.  Following one of the several guides on how to upgrade the RAM in the netbook, I took it apart and not only added more RAM, but also installed an OS X-friendly wireless card. Now it’s time to play.

I am installing Vista on one partition right now and will be installing OS X on another at a later date.  I really want to see what the platform is capable of.  My long term plan is to run Vista and Ubuntu with a third partition in the middle with my personal data on it.  I’ll post updates here.

I know that a full review of my Acer Aspire One is getting overdue and I have had a few people ping me on it now.  Rest assured that it’s something I am working on, but I have to ask for patience as the workload from my day job is nearly overwhelming me.  As an element of that larger review, I thought I would post my thoughts on the touchpad in response to a reader’s question.

Honestly, this was something I was quite concerned about when I ordered the device.  There were two things that were the cause for concern:  the unconventional button placement and the finish of the pad.  Let me address these separately.

I personally use the tap functionality of the touchpad for my 95% of my left-click needs.  I find that it’s much faster and more natural than hitting a separate button when I use the touchpad on any laptop.  That having been said, the left-click button is not an issue to me.  The only time I ever use it is when I am dragging a window or scrollbar for more than a short distance (I use the tap and hold feature for short drags).  Reaching to the side instead of the bottom actually feels more natural for me when doing this because I tend to use my left hand for the button and the right hand for movement.

That only leaves right-clicking as a concern and I made the adjustment to the side button in about a tenth of a second.  It makes absolutely no difference to me.   My only complaint is that the buttons are a little on the loud side when you click.  This isn’t an issue in most circumstances, but in very quiet environments is something that I have noticed.

Enough about the button placement, let me share what I thought was going to be a bigger deal for me:  the surface finish of the touchpad.  Unlike most laptop manufacturers, Acer decided to paint the touchpad with the same paint used for the casing.  It is a high gloss paint that you tend to stick to instead of glide over.  At first, it bugged me a good deal, but either the “stickiness” is wearing off or I am getting used to it since it no longer bothers me in the least. 

Like most touchpads today, it features vertical scrolling functionality by dragging your finger along the right side of the pad and horizontal scrolling by dragging along the bottom.  When scrolling, the mouse cursor changes to a unique icon that looks something like the top view of a mouse pointer being pulled into a tornado.  The driver has way more options than the driver on my Lenovo laptop which allow adjustment for the scroll zones, sensitivity, tap and drag functionality, and lots more (I have included a screen shot of all the options here).  There is an option for what they call “coasting” where you can start a long document scrolling and it will continue to scroll even after you have lifted your finger off the touchpad (and until you tap the pad again) that is surprisingly useful for web browsing.  Overall, I am pleased with the options Acer provides for their touchpad.

In summary, neither of the two concerns I had about the touchpad when I purchased the unit have turned out to be issues at all.  The reality is that the Acer Aspire One is a very usable device and the touchpad is no exception to that observation.  And there you have it - more than I thought I would ever write about the touchpad on a mobile computer.  If there is anything you would like to know that I didn’t cover here, simply leave a comment or shoot me an email and I’ll gladly fill you in!

As I was “moving in” to the Aspire One, I was quite impressed with the capability of the system.  One of the first applications I installed was Daemon Tools so that I could mount ISO images of DVD’s and install applications directly from backup images of my software media.  This worked like an absolute dream and I found that I could install things in the background as I copied large data files and made some notes in OpenOffice Writer all at the same time.  The system maintained performance as I multitasked pretty hard.

I really like the keyboard a lot.  There is very little that I need to adjust in my typing habits to be very effective.  I can type full speed and find that I make very few errors due to all of the keys being in the proper locations (something that drove me crazy on the Classmate and would on any unit that moved the keys).  The key travel on the keyboard is just right for the size.  I would guess it is a little less than my Lenovo keyboard, but not by very much.

The screen is very bright.  I can use it at far less than full brightness and even outside it was very readable.  I have heard people complain about the glossy screens in the sunlight, but this worked very well.  Sure, if I tried, I could focus my eyes differently and see myself in the reflection, but it was not a distraction to me at all and I found that the screen was not washed out like I thought it would be.  I am surprised that there is no onscreen display that shows the brightness level when I adjust it.

The battery life is not outstanding, but I am very pleased to see that the power brick has an output of 19 volts.  That means that I can use my batterygeek battery with it.  This may save me from purchasing the 6 cell battery I was planning on, but I won’t know that for sure for a few days.  I will run a few tests to see how long the battery will last for me.  While I’m working it pretty including downloading applications via wireless, Windows thinks that the battery will last right around 2 hours on a full charge.

The only other issue for me is that the fan noise on the device is noticable.  It is a bit louder than my T61, but significantly quieter than my desktop system.  I have downloaded a small utility called AA1FanControl that completely shuts off the fan when the system is below a specifiied temperature.  I will write a bit more about this application at a later date if I decide to keep it.

In all, I am very pleased with this purchase.  The netbook is a very capable platform and I have already been using it more than I thought I might.  I will post more at a later date about some of the specifics of the Aspire One - if there is something you’d like to know, shoot me an email or leave a comment.

I have never done an unboxing video.  Mostly that’s because I am too impatient when I get a new device, but this time I exercised some discipline and shot the following video after my Acer Aspire One showed up on Friday.

I wrote a post about a new gadget on the way and I had every intention of posting hints about my new purchase each day or two until it arrived.  Then reality hit.  I have been traveling for work again and just haven’t had the time to do much outside the scope of my day job.  Well, it turns out that my new Acer Aspire One is on a FedEx truck on the way to my house right now.

Why an Aspire One?  Here are my thoughts:

1. Each of the available netbooks are so similar that I thought it wouldn’t make a huge difference which one I chose.
2. I had the chance to put my hands on a Linspire version at a brick and mortar store.
3. The keyboard has traditional key placement so I can touch type on it.
4. 1GB of RAM and the 120GB hard drive will get me going without the need to hack the system right away (although the geek in me will probably do it anyway).
5. I want time on a device that is readily available to consumers (more on this at a later date).
6. The blue marbled finish is cool - how’s that for superficial?

Through work, I have had or will shortly have the chance to play with quite a few different netbooks, so I will write up some comparison posts as chance allows.  Of course there will be a post about my impressions later today or tomorrow after I get it in hand!