There’s a new hype going on in the world of computing. I used to call them ‘tiny laptops’, but somewhere along the way, Intel’s marketing got at me and now I call them netbooks. Every self-respecting manufacturer has a netbook product line, or is about to introduce one (Apple?), so I figured I would take a look at what all the fuss is about: I bought a netbook.
Shopping around in Dutch online and real-world shops presented me with two netbook candidates: the Acer Aspire One, and the MSI Wind. The machines were more or less similar, both sporting the brand new Intel Atom 1.6Ghz processor, and a display with a 1024×600 resolution. The MSI Wind has 1024MB of RAM, while the One only has 512MB (expandable to 1.5GB). Their displays might sport the same resolution, but the One has a 8.9″ screen while the Wind has a 10″ one. Communication wise, they are identical, except for the fact that the Wind has built-in Bluetooth. They both have a built-in webcam too.
The big difference between the two is on the software front. The Acer Aspire One model I was looking at comes with Linux – Linpus Linux Lite v1.0.3.E, to be precise, a Fedora derivative. The Wind, on the other hand, comes with Windows XP Home. The choice of software influences the choice of storage medium: since Windows XP has performance issues on SSD drives, the Wind comes with a traditional 80GB hard drive, while the One has an 8GB solid state drive.
The biggest difference, however, comes when you look at the pricetags. The Wind costs EUR 429,-, while the One is yours for only EUR 299,-. This is a pretty convincing argument to go with the One, which is exactly what I did. I bought the One at a real-world shop, and I opted for the white variant, as the blue model looks awkward (blue and black isn’t as pretty a combination as white and black). I also bought a 4GB SD card for storage expansion, but more on that later.
The looks
The 0.9kg device’s looks won’t blow you away, but it is far from ugly. Externally, the screen lid is covered in a piano white finish, while the base is of a rough texture, also white. Between the screen hinges you will find four LEDs which indicate power, disk activity, and caps and num lock status. On the right side of the device are microphone and headphone jacks, two USB 2.0 ports, a multifunction card reader, and one of those security thingies. On the left side, there’s the power connector, VGA port, ethernet, a third USB 2.0 port, and a special SD card slot for ‘storage expansion’. Any SD card you insert into this slot will magically be added to the SSD storage pool – the 4GB SD card I bought upped my storage from 8GB to 12GB. Since 8GB and 16GB SD cards are becoming ever more common and affordable, this is a rather cheap and effective method of expanding storage.
The screen bezel has a piano black finish, and the keyboard is white, with nearly full-size keys. I have very small hands and fingers, so for me the keyboard poses no problems – however, some reports online indicate that people without baby hands need a little adjustment before typing comfortably on the keyboard.
The hardware
The screen of the One is 1024×600, 8.9″, and has that glossy finish, something some love, some hate. In any case, the screen is very bright, and can be read in dim and bright light conditions, perfect for a mobile device. The size is a bit small at first, but you get used to it quickly. It’s perfect for browsing, especially when combined with Firefox 3.0’s excellent full-screen capabilities (F11).
The solid state drive poses some problems. Especially with small write operations it’s quite slow, which can become annoying when you’re dealing with larger amounts of emails. It does aid in boot time though, it takes only about 20 seconds from pressing the power button to a fully operational desktop.
The Atom processor, running at 1.6Ghz, delivers remarkable performance. Processor hoggers such as Flash content and large video files play without glitches, even in full screen. The amount of RAM, 512MB, might seem a little low, but I’ve yet to encounter any limitations. The device does have an SODIMM DDR memory slot, but to access it you need to dismantle the entire device, voiding warranty and risking serious damage.
The video chipset is an Intel Graphics Media Accelerator x3100, with its shared memory size set to 8MB, with a maximum of 384MB if you so desire. Remarkably enough, the Linux installation comes with a hidden treat: a fully configured and working installation of Compiz Fusion, disabled by default. Launch compiz-manager, and you get fancy Compiz effects – fancy effects that work, and don’t seem to bog down the device at all (except for the fact that Firefox scrolling becomes jerky). The spinning cube, wobbly windows – they all work.
The only real hardware letdown is the touchpad, which requires some major adjusting on the user’s side. The buttons are located on the sides of the pad, which is downright odd at first – I’m still not entirely used to it. The benefit, of course, is that the touchpad’s height isn’t affected too much by the device’s size. Another problem is that while you hit the buttons with a horizontal movement, the buttons are vertical in nature, making them easy to miss.
The software
The Acer Aspire One comes loaded with Linpus Linux Lite, a derivative of Fedora. Acer created a custom interface, similar to Asus and its eeePC, built on top of Xfce 4.4.2. It comes loaded with a pre-emptive variant of the Linux kernel, version 2.6.23.9lw. It comes pre-installed with OpenOffice.org 2.3, as well as Firefox 2.0. Sadly, upgrading to firefox 3.0 must be done manually, since the update utility included with the One doesn’t yet deliver Firefox 3.0. The One is distributed with in-house mail and instant messaging clients, written in Gtk+. These clients are still relatively new, and while being stable, they can be somewhat limited in functionality at times. The instant messaging client does support video chat using the internal webcam, but only via the MSN messaging network. Other protocols are supported, but they do not do video just yet.
Since you are more or less using Fedora, you can use the official and Livna repositories to extend the functionality of the One quite easily, but some knowledge of Linux is required. Using Yum, I installed Vlc, since the version of Mplayer included didn’t play any of the Xvid files I threw at it. I also installed Xchat for irc, and Lbreakout2 because it is one of the coolest games in existence. Adding new applications to the custom interface is a bit tricky, since you need to edit an xml file, but for more experienced users this isn’t a problem.
Sleep and wake functionality is excellent on the One, albeit somewhat slow to wake up. It reconnects to the wireless network quite fast though, although once every while it refuses to do so – flicking the hardware wireless switch on the front of the device on and off solves this problem instantly.
Battery life isn’t exactly rosy – a mere 2.5 hours, at best, when using the wireless internet. This is because the One ships – mostly – with a 3-cell battery. The 6-cell battery, which is capable of 7 hours, will ship later this year.
Misc
There is an avid user community located at AspireOneUser.com, which provides guides and howto’s ranging from installing more RAM to – yes – installing Mac OS X. It’s a treasure trove of information, so be sure to check the site’s forums when you encounter any problems.
In the future, Acer is supposed to release a 3G upgrade for the One; a slot is located at the bottom of the device, as well as a slot for a SIM card. When this upgrade arrives is still unknown.
The device is also available with Windows XP, 1GB of RAM, and an 80GB conventional hard drive. Windows XP can be installed on the Linux version too; Acer provides the drivers to do so on its FTP site.
Updates are provided through an in-house update utility.
Conclusion
To sum up the Acer Aspire One: this is what notebooks should have always been like. Small, portable, light, fast, and cheap. For just EUR 299, you are getting a proper netbook, with all the functionality of its big brothers and sisters. Maybe not as full-featured as the MSI Wind, and not as hyped as the eeePC, but still the better choice, simply because it’s a hell of a lot cheaper.
Pros:
Price
Performance
Design
Easy storage expansion
Cons:
Touchpad
Lack of access to RAM slot
SSD performance should be better
MacBook Air for the small lightweight end, MacBook for the mid range, MacBook Pros for the high grade. Unless the author wanted cheap and small laptops. I doubt apple will make them, as apple tries to avoid the low end, unless they really have to. As the small and cheap notebooks while may have a decent processor have tiny low res screen 1024×600 is now low res… sorry… For people who use OS X low resolution is a killer. OS X is really good on high resolution screens. Linux is better for low res screens, Windows kinda handles the middle. Now there are the pluses and minuses to these methods but if OS X doesn’t look good on it. Apple won’t release it.
At a screensize of 13.3″ I’d hardly call the Air small. I personally wouldn’t consider anything with a screen larger than 10″ a netbook. I have a 12″ x41 thinkpad and the size and weight difference between that and an Asus EEE, while not so much on paper, is truly significant in actual everyday usage. Personally I’d quite like to see a mini Air, with the same basic design, but a 8-10″ screen.
The other huge advantage of the EEE or the Acer One is that it is really cheap. You can bring it with you on trips and never have to worry too much about it being stolen or broken. I’d be seriously nervous bringing an Apple Air on a backpacking or some other more adventurous trip, but I wouldn’t think twice about throwing a EEE or Acer One into my pack.
At the price Apple would probably charge, it would definitely be a “notbook” for me!
Isn’t the MBA close to a pound heavier than typical “netbooks”? If the Air is a sub-notebook, then the Eee (et al) are sub-sub-notebooks.
Eh? I doubt anyone is going to find that shocking. Low-resolution isn’t unusable by any means – nor his high resolution inherently “good”, as evidenced by all of the Dells, Compaqs, etc, with 17″ displays with ridiculously-low pixel density.
That doesn’t seem to have hampered them too much with the iPhone.
IMO, the biggest reason why Apple *probably* won’t release a netbook is that selling something with such low profit-margins would be completely antithetical to their business model.
Actually, Apple has released a netbook. It’s called the iPod Touch (or the iPhone if you need the added functionality of a cellphone). Both devices have wireless capabilities and internet browsers. Combine that with Google Docs and a Gmail account, and you’re all set!
Apple certainly priced it like one – but the iPhone would first need non-crippled Bluetooth support (or does the 3g model work with BT keyboards) at the very least before it was anywhere near the functional equivalent of a netbook.
is (or used to be) a Psion trademark.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetBook
Seems it expired though, nothing shows up for it, not even from intel:
http://www.wipo.int/ipdl/en/search/madrid/search-struct.jsp
Would intel push marketing on a term they didn’t trademark yet ??
Go register it
I’ve been thinking about getting a netbook quite a lot lately.
It’s odd that you complain about write performance for _small_ files since this is one area where (in theory) SSDs should do better than HDDs.
Can any expert comment on this?
For me, however, the main reason to choose SSD over HDD is rough handling. An object this small and lite is bound to get dropped. I’d probably forget I put it in my backpack and just drop it on the floor like I always do…
The only reason for me not to buy one this minute is that I don’t really travel that much…
You’re confusing reads and writes. For reading lots of small files, flash memory are much faster than HDD, as the seek times (which are dominant when reading small non-contingent blocks) of flash is at least an order of magnitude better.
However, unlike HDD where reading and writing are roughly the same speed, writing on flash is typically much slower than reading. On NAND flash, you can’t just flip bits at will. Data is written in pages which are many (sometimes even hundreds, depending on the total size) of kilobytes. Anytime a single bit in a page needs to change from 0 to 1, all other bits in the page needs to be erased/reset to 1 as well. This is especially bad (relatively speaking) for very small writes.
Ah yes, that’s it.
Makes me wonder though if the limited number of writes could become a problem after all (if it’s mainly small files).
But whatever, it doesn’t cost a fortune and it fails rather gracefully (on writes instead of on reads).
It was ’bout time.
Summer sux
No mention of a CD-ROM in the review, nor are there any pics of the left side. Just curious as to these specs.
none of the current gen netbooks have optical drives. not even an option for one.
One of the things I find odd about the netbooks is how short the battery life is for many of them. Really, to me, the WHOLE POINT of a netbook is to create a light, easy to user, “throw it in your book-bag” kind of computer. Well, I guess most people are expected to mostly leave the netbook in the book-bag while they are on the go. Myself, I believe it should always have a battery life approaching 8-12 hours, so it can be used on the go for the WHOLE day, not just a quick web surf or email check here and there.
So, again, why is it so difficult to get an appropriate battery life out of a netbook? I realize it must remain light, but if a little less powerful cpu is used, a flash drive for storage, and other power-saving measures are employed, isn’t it reasonable to get 8-12 hours? What’s missing?
To me, the standard for this was the Palm III. Using just 2 AAA batteries, it lasted for weeks before I had to worry about a low battery. Meanwhile my CE device would only go about 4-6 hours. I remember taking notes in my C++ class with a CE hand-held. I had to plug it in before the end of the class (a four-hour class). That seems to be the current state of most netbooks.
I heard it was due to a fire at a major supplier that the proper 6-cell battery (7hrs of battery life) is hard to come by. Not sure how truthful that one is though.
Yeah, really – IMO, that’s the most disappointing aspect of most of the netbooks I’ve seen/read about.
It seems that portables have backslid in that sense – E.g., I know several journalists who still wax nostalgic about their old Radio Shack Model 100s and how they could get 12 hours on four double A batteries.
This particular issue is true with pretty much all portable devices.
whilst technology has evolved massively to produce a lot of utility in a portable form factor, battery technology is still stuck in the dark ages. You can cover it up by adding more cells but then you sacrifice portability.
Pretty much all our power generation and storage technology evolves at a much slower rate than computing technology ( would we still be using fossil fuels if that weren’t the case?).
Eventually we will get to the point where it becomes impractical to have something portable as the batteries become a ball and chain to any portable electronics device. Fuel cells may solve that or super capacitors but those two are either still too large or still to theoretical.
But you have to remember that the Palm and TR-100 had:
1) A small black and white screen
2) No COLOR! to power
3) No OS per se that taxing the HD or SSD
4) Come on the CPU…
5) No eternet to power
6) No USB to power
7) No wifi or bluetooth to power
Almost like having a motorcycle battery to start a HEMI.
Been wanting to get a netbook for business for a while now. I bought an eee for my mum to use, and I find the device nice, but the choice of Linux is a major disadvantage. It’s completely crippled unless you have a decent knowledge in Linux distro maintenance and and keep up with a nearly every-day schedule of fixes and adjustments.
It’s hard to decide between all the slowness and pain of using Windows on a netbook, or the broken-out-of-the-box pains of a badly chosen Linux.
What I really want is someone to release a netbook running the latest Ubuntu, where I don’t have to edit a single configuration script, or sudo *anything* just to re-compile the wireless for the sixth time in a row.
Edited 2008-08-12 17:59 UTC
If there was anyone at Palm/Access with an ounce of sense or vision, they would get their excrement together by resurrecting / updating the Foleo – and while they’re at it, *finally* making use of that BeOS IP they’ve wasted for nearly a decade now.
A man can dream…
Modded down for truth I see. All the Linux distros on these netbooks so far fall short of Windows. That’s just plain fact. There’s zero built in UI way to install software on the eee. How is that better than the Windows version, eh?
The EEEPC is indeed handicapped by a very poor choice of Linux distribution and an extremely limited additional repository.
The Acer Aspire One however uses Linpus Linux Lite, which is basically Fedora 8 with an Xfce desktop manager. It is fairly simple to get access to “Add/Remove Software” from scratch.
http://www.aspireoneuser.com/2008/07/09/aspire-one-advance-linpus-m…
One command in a terminal, in fact, and a few clicks in the GUI settings manager. This gives you access to the full menus, which includes “Add/Remove Software” which is the Red Hat/Fedora Packet Manager.
Once you have enabled the right-click menu, you can then use additional Fedora repositories:
http://www.aspireoneuser.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=734&sid=bc6…
There is at least one way to get a similar full-featured Linux going on the EEEPC:
http://eeepc.net/mandriva-20081-works-with-eee-pcs/
http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/Docs/Installing_Mandriva_Linux
PS: The HP and the MSI Wind use SuSe … although I wouldn’t use SuSe myself, I can’t see how anyone would claim that SuSe is limited.
http://www.liliputing.com/hp-mini-note
Edited 2008-08-13 10:45 UTC
A good review – thank you – an interesting read.
If comparisons have to be made with Apple products (which I doubt); then an iPodTouch with (say) a 9″ screen (and Bluetooth … please – pretty please) would get a few folks salivating.
I note Tom that your PowerBook is in the photos – did you swap out that hard drive or is the review machine your replacement?
It’s Thom. With the ‘h’
.
I replaced the hard drive in the PowerBook. And threw every cussword I knew in Dutch, English, and German towards Cupertino. What a bitch to service, the PowerBook G4.
Edited 2008-08-12 18:18 UTC
Thom thinks thankful thoughts, though they thoroughly threaten the thoughtless throng.
Sorry Thom – I stand corrected.
As for the Powerbook, yep I remember the swearing and that first drink after it all worked was a precious moment!
Got one of these about three weeks back (when they first became available). Very nice experience, still, a few points to consider:
* I have the three cell battery, landing me at a practical battery life of 2.5-3 hours. For me this seems like a good weight/batter life tradeoff, as I don’t use it for that long stretches, but plan to carry it around a lot.
* The SSD is indeed quite terribly slow in writing. For Linux installs make sure to add the noatime flags for the FS, and probably opt for ext2 (with such a small disk fsck is quick anyway, and the journaling is pretty significant on the slow disk). If you install XP, you must disable the “Acer disk mirroring”-thing (used for recovery partitions I think?) in the BIOS (with this on the disk performance is completely unusable, with it off the disk behaves much like in Linux). Also, turn off atime for NTFS, or go with FAT32.
* Installing a Linux distribution other than the bundled lands you in the usual set of problems for many new laptops: Wifi works badly (ndiswrapper or glitchy madwifi svn branch), software suspend panics/crashes/hangs a third of the time or so, some hardware (webcam for instance) appears tricky to get to work. So while the situation may no doubt improve, don’t buy it counting on loading up Ubuntu without hassles.
* Note that the only video out is a VGA. The deal for the Intel Atom does not allow digital out (HDMI/DVI), but the lack of S-video is a touch dissapointing to me personally.
With those points said: It is a great little laptop. Cheap, great keyboard, beautiful screen, performs just fine (other than SSD). The HD versions may be a better deal all said, as they cost only a little bit more, and the bluetooth addition is pretty nice.
It’s been with me for a week now. It’s a nice netbook, much better than the EeePC 701 I had before (sold, ebay!). Acer was stupid enough to NOT include a back door to add RAM. So I voided my warranty in order to add 512Mb for a total of 1Gb RAM. It feels smoother now.
I’m using it with a 8Gb SDHC for additional storage space and I had a 8Gb USB Key also. Enough for the road!
But the real pain is the SSD. It’s terribly slow, near unusable with WinXP. I wanted to run WinXP because I found the Linux install to be limited. And I’m no expert on Linux….
All in all, it’s a nice netbook with a crap SSD drive.
Have you disabled the Acer D2D recovery option in the BIOS? This is more or less required to make it work acceptably in XP. Heres some extra tips also:
* If you are making a new install, use FAT32 (journaling is expensive on the slow SSD).
* If you already have NTFS, disable “last access time stamps”, see: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms940846.aspx
* For browsing, I noted that IE and Firefox both have some bad write behaviour (Firefox 3 being especially bad, with huge sqlite sync()’s every time you hit enter in the location bar). Try Opera with disk cache disabled (it is in advanced options, history).
* Disable system restore.
* You may want to disable the page file. This has some rather performance reprecussions, but really gives you a more predictable behaviour (especially as you have a gig of ram anyway).
That’s about it, I find mine to be quite useable in XP after disabling D2D and tweaking a bit.
I did everything you said, it’s still unusable. Would you believe that it took almost 10 mins to install WinAMP? The SSD seems to be working all the time and I have nothing running, no anti-virus, no auto-update.
The SSD is pure crap for WinXP.
The SSD inside the first Asus EeePC was faster than this. I guess you get what you pay for.
I like this new laptop form factor but I I think I’m going to old off getting one they get the kinks worked out, especially software wise.
What I’m waiting for is better file-system support for SSD behavior, the next-gen Atom platform from Intel, and the screens that Pixel Qi is developing for mass commercialization (the screens used on the OLPC and being further developed by Mary Lou Jespen). Further on my wishlist would be Displayport support, especially if they use it to reduce the amount of circuitry needed to drive the laptop screen, Wireless USB, and mesh networking support (802.11s).
All this combined should add up to the desired 8-12 hour battery life.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JFFS2
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LogFS
http://www.logfs.org/logfs/
It is already available.
I think netbooks are a waste of money. You can’t see anything on that tiny screen. You can’t store anything on that tiny drive. You cannot do anything with it except showing off to your friend how small it is. It cannot replace a desktop nor a laptop for heavy daily use.
I don’t understand why people buy them. I have multiple desktops and laptops, I can’t image my self using a netbook. It doesn’t fit anywhere in my own needs.
I have a notebook as well, as you can see in the pictures (in fact, I have two). A 15″ PowerBook. The problem is that if you actually go places, even a 15″ PowerBook is going to show. As in, you can’t hide the fact you’re carrying around a computer. And in Amsterdam, or any other major city, that’s not something you want unhidden in some neighbourhoods.
My One? No one’s going to know I’m carrying that around. It weighs nothing, and even if I put this in my bag, the bag seems utterly empty – in fact, you barely feel the weight difference.
Couple this with 3G and a data-only subscription, and I can work on OSAlert, my blog, and university stuff from wherever I am, and seeing I spend quite some time away from either home or university, this can be a real timesaver.
This has nothing to do with showing off, as you seem to imply. It has to do with being practical. A portable computer should be portable for freck’s sake, not something that looks like it’s portable but in fact is about as portable as a bag of sand.
Netbooks are the real notebooks, the way all notebooks should be. I’m happy they exist, and I’m happy this niche of the market has finally shown up.
Precisely. exactly. Spot on.
The primary exciting thing about these netbook machines is their small size and low weight … ultraportability. The fact that they are cheap is also a huge enabler.
Having a pre-installed Linux giving an open system with access to a full repository (heaps of additional software at zero extra cost) rounds out a VERY impressive feature set. Excellent value for money.
Getting one with a 6-cell battery should yield 6 or 7 hours battery life.
Ultraportability. Convenience. Security. Stability. Power. Flexibility. Control of your own machine. Access to a vast array of software … extensibility. Connectivity. Affordability. Compatibility.
These machines (with a proper Linux installed) are a game breaker.
I love it when people say “What can you do with a 900MHz processor, a mere 8 gigabytes of storage and 512 megabytes of RAM?”. They can’t remember when they happily did everything they do today on computers with similar specifications. I’ve done 3D rendering and video editing on computers with worse specs than that!
What can you do on such a limited computer? Anything!
Almost anything.
It is very tough, for example, to run Vista on such a machine.
To get processor grunt, you need power. To get enough power for long enough in a portable machine, you need battery capacity. To get enough battery capacity, you need both weight and volume (the other possible tradeoff is to sacrifice battery time). To get weight and volume, you need to sacrifice portability.
The “netbook” class of machines make a different set of compromises in these trade-offs than conventional laptops and notebook machines do. Netbooks make less compromise on portability, about the same compromise on battery time, and they heavily compromise processor power as a consequence … compared to laptops and notebook machines.
Hence … not enough CPU & video-card grunt to run Vista. Not even a good idea to bog it down with XP plus antivirus & antimalware scanners.
What can you do on such a CPU/GPU-grunt limited computer?
Anything that deosn’t require Windows!
I was trying to make up my mind between the Acer and the Asus variants, and this review pretty much convinced me.
Thanks.
far cheaper than a wind, EXACTLY the same hardware
http://www.pcworld.co.uk/martprd/product/seo/219404
Edited 2008-08-13 10:23 UTC
The word “netbook” sucks really bad.
It’s just a freakin little laptop.
What’s wrong with that?
Don’t buy into the marketing crap and let the language be raped even further by some person behind a desk in a PR firm.