David Flynn21 May 2009, 10:00 AM
The best-selling netbook gets a big brother with an 11.6 inch HD display, eight hour battery life and $899 price tag.
Acer was early off the netbook starting blocks with the original 8.9 inch Aspire One. Fuelled by a neat spec set, a $100 rebate and the choice of Linux or Windows, the Aspire One quickly zoomed to the top of the sales charts in Australia, overseas and online.
(It was the best-selling netbook on Amazon.com last Christmas and even today the 8.9 inch and 10.1 inch models hold three of the Top Five slots in Amazon’s netbook category).
But it seems the Aspire One aspires (
ahem!) to bigger and better things. Next week sees the debut of an 11.6 inch version which goes by the catchy sobriquet of the A0751 and carries an $899 price tag.
The unfamiliar screen size allows Acer’s new netbook to run at 1366 x 768 pixels for 720p HD, although good luck trying to get any such high-res videos playing on the 1.33GHz Atom Z520 processor and integrated Intel graphics.
The good news is that if you settle back to watch some downloaded SD videos you should be able to get through eight six hours of viewing before the six-cell 5200 mAh battery goes belly-up.
Acer says that figure comes from tests using Mobile Mark2007 in its ‘productivity’ mode with Wi-Fi activated, which is an improvement on some vendors’ habits of disabling wireless, dimming the screen to near-darkness and leaving the netbook sitting there with zero hard disk activity.
One interesting design touch is that the VGA and LAN sockets are
located on the left and right rear corners of the chassis rather than
on the side panels. Those rear corners of the case are angled so as to
ensure these thick cables snake directly away from the netbook rather
than curling up and getting in the way next to it.
The VGA port (shown above) and LAN port are mounted at angles on the rear corners of the Aspire One
The larger screen permits a more generous keyboard with large flat keys and the same 19mm key spacing or ‘pitch’ as on a full-sized laptop, while the trackpad supports multi-touch gestures.
The keyboard on the new 11.6 inch Aspire One has the same pitch as a conventional laptop
For storage there’s a 160GB hard drive with both 802.11g and Bluetooth
wireless. Acer hasn’t mentioned 3G as an option but this is already
available for the netbook in European and Asian markets we expect it to
turn up here before long.
A nod to the netbook’s nomadic nature is Acer’s ‘international travellers warranty’ which provides carry-in service at Acer service centres around the world.