Bovine's super amazing laptop review! Must Read, obviously!

[bovine]

So I went and purchased this little beauty the other day on the ol' tiger direct for around $447 (this is with tax and shipping mind you).



It's the Acer Aspire One. I have been dreaming of owning a laptop on a super-poor student's budget and when I saw this little number I could not resist. The most stripped down version (3 cell battery, 8GB SSD, 512MB ram, Linux Linpus OS) runs just over $300 and that is a pretty damned good deal. I hadn't really heard anything about these netbooks except for the super huge (but thin!) Macbook air. It is similar in that it is tiny! It is 249mm x 36mm x 170mm. It's not going for so much the thin as the general smallness.

So what's so great about this little puppy? Well, under the hood it is the epitome of nothing special.

Processor Brand: Intel
Processor Class: Atom™ processor N270
Processor Speed: 1.60GHz
Processor FSB: 533MHz
Processor Cache: 512KB
Memory Type: DDR2
Memory Size: 1GB (512MB onboard + 512MB)
Memory Speed: DDR2 533
Capacity: 120GB
Optical Drive Type: N/A
Supplemental Drive Type: Media Reader
Media Types: Memory Stick
xD-Picture Card
Memory Stick PRO
Multi Media Card
Secure Digital card, Reduced-Size Multi Media Card
Media Types: SecureDigital
Audio Description: Integrated Audio
Audio Chipset: Microsoft DirectSound compatibility
Graphics Description: Integrated Graphics
GPU/VPU: Intel® Graphics Media Accelerator 950
Communications Description: Integrated LAN
Integrated Wireless LAN
Interface Type: RJ-45 Ethernet Connector
802.11b/g Wireless Networking

Yeah yeah yeah, it's pretty underpowered in terms of raw power, but when all I really need to use this thing for is word processing, internetting, and watching episodes of Lucky Star in between classes, this thing is a champion! It even plays guild wars and original halflife! I want to test out Dawn of War and Warhammer Online, but more on why I can't in a second.

The quality of the chassis on this thing is wonderful! It's made out of whatever they make PSPs and DS Lites out of, so obviously it's a fingerprint magnet. I got the blue one, and it especially shows up on that particular colour. The version that I purchased came with a 120GB HDD, 1GB ram, 7 cell battery and Windows XP (turns out that I missed it). This little baby lasts like 8 hours off of one charge when just internetting, so I'm pretty darn happy with it. It does everything that I want it to do, but nothing more. For $450, I am amazingly pleased with this. Also, it is ADORABLE! The size certainly increases the cute factor..... if you're into that kind of thing. So here's the "Bovine Super Amazing Laptop Review!" Wrap up.

Pros
-ADORABLE!
-120GB is tons of space for your choice of either Geass or Lucky Star
-Intel Atom Processor makes internet happen zippily
-Battery life like you wouldn't believe
-Super tiny for maximum take-arounding.

Oh, I forgot to talk about what is crappy about it. Are you ready? Well, here it is real fast. The keyboard is SUPER small, and that is lame. Tiny keyboard is also compounded with two additional problems. The first being that it's in international keyboard! What are all those extra keys for? I don't know and will never use them. The second is that a couple of my keys were terribly unresponsive. Hitting "L" six times to make one "L" appear is no fun for anyone. Also, there was a jangly noise that sounded like a screw or something was just loose inside the case. I promptly have sent my little baby-lappy in for repair, and hopefully it will be back soon because I miss it.

Cons
-super-tiny keyboard
-super-tiny international keyboard
-some people do not like things that are adorable
-jangly thing inside and non-responsive keyboard make me send it back for repair.

There you go folks. How do you like me now?

[Kupek]

To save someone else the effort, the dimensions in inches are 9.4 x 6.7 x 1.4.

I actually find this class of laptops fascinating - I know someone who has one, and it seemed good if you just want mobile browsing and email. I wouldn't want to do real work on one, due to the small screen size and keyboard.

But the fascination comes from I don't know what the future of super-mobile computing (or even mobile computing) will be. On one end we have this, which is taking a laptop and scaling it down, and on the other end, we have smart phones, which take a cell phone and scale it up. Will the winner clearly be primarily a laptop, clearly be primarily a cellphone, or will it truly be the combination of both?

Does it have a microphone? I ask because of Skype.

[bovine]

yes! webcam 'n everything.

[Lox]

That is pretty nice. Sounds like a great idea for someone on a budget.

I've been craving one of those Dell Vistro 14" laptops for a while now. I have a 15.4" at home that I can use for programming and other stuff. But a small laptop would be killer for school and basic travel.

[Kupek]

yes! webcam 'n everything.

Nifty. The Skype people should work with some manufacturer like Asus (but not necessarily them) so it can be more like a phone. It would almost certainly require some kernel hacking - it uses Linux, so that's possible. Skype could even be integrated into the kernel. That's a terrible policy for general purpose computing, but it makes sense for a super mobile computer that you want to act as a phone. (I would be shocked if the basic phone functionality - receiving calls - was not in the kernel for mobile phone OSes.)

You'd want the computer to be in some suspend mode, but get woken up from a phone call. This is hard because while you can power down the screen and the drive (although as a SSD, it probably doesn't use much to begin with), you would still need the wireless connection and processor on, both of which can use a lot of power. A processor with dynamic frequency scaling might help, but I'm not sure if that's enough. I think you'd need to achieve a 24 hour battery life to truly replace a phone. I mentioned working with a manufacturer because I imagine a good solution would require special hardware.