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: SDTM Card reader and Multi-in-1 card reader: Supporting Secure DigitalTM (SD) Card, MultiMediaCard (MMC), Reduced-Size Multimedia Card (RS-MMC), Memory Stick® (MS), Memory Stick PROTM (MS PRO), xD-Picture CardTM (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
The other day, I went to plug something into the USB port and was having a little trouble getting it to go in. When I started paying attention to what I was doing, I realized that I was trying to put a USB drive into the Ethernet port. It dawned on me that this would totally explain my previous experience when my Aspire One stopped working. If I had plugged my drive into the network port before, it wouldn’t have booted (like it didn’t), and it certainly could have shorted the board out (like something did).
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