Acer Aspire AS1410-2285 - Best Value in a Shipping Netbook?

If you are looking for the best value in a shipping netbook, today is your day. For around $400 plus shipping, you can get the Acer Aspire AS1410-2285 shipped from Amazon, and if you’re willing to spend extra, you could have it on Friday.

What does $399.99 plus shipping get you? Quite a bit actually, it will get a dual-core CPU with Intel’s 4500MHD graphics, an HDMI port, Windows 7 Premium, and an 11.6-inch display.

Full specifications: Acer Aspire AS1410-2285 (Black casing)
- OS: Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium
- CPU: 1.2GHz Intel Celeron SU2300 Dual-Core CULV CPU
- RAM: 2GB DDR2 667MHz
- HDD: 160GB SATA Hard Drive
- Networking: Intel WiFi Link 1000 802.11a/b/g/Draft-N
- Graphics: Intel 4500MHD Graphics (GMA)
- Display: 11.6″ WXGA LED-Backlit Display
- Battery: 6-cell Li-ion Battery (4400 mAh), up to 6 hours according to Acer
-Weight: 3 pounds/1.4 kg

In addition to the above, it’s coming with three USB 2.0 ports, an HDMI port, and a Multi-gesture touchpad.

Looking at Acer’s other Windows 7 listings at Amazon, it looks like HDMI out will finally be standard. Most of the Acers should be expandable to 4GB of RAM.

While this is a Celeron, expect non-Celeron-based netbooks with dual-core CPUs to be out in the next few weeks. Amazon is showing the Acer Aspire AS1810T-8679 with a Core 2 Duo SU7300, up to 8 hours of battery life, and 4GB of RAM shipping in November.

Netbooks Impacting the Mainstream Market

Joe Wilcox, editor of Microsoft Watch, has put together an in-depth article about the impact netbooks are having on the traditional, or mainstream, laptop/notebook market.

Netbooks are cannibalizing the low-end part of the market and driving some margins down (in the so-called “race to the bottom”). Just how much they are is up for debate - I think once we’ve seen another quarter or two, and factor in the MSI Wind U100 and Acer Aspire One launch during the first half of last year, then we’ll have a better idea on just what kind of impact they are having. eWeek considers this a huge problem for the overall PC market, and they believe the Microsoft must be a part of anything that addresses this. They mention the first quarter 2009 shipment information that was just released by both Gartner and IDC, and PC shipments declined by 6.5 percent over this time last year, while netbooks/sub-notebooks sales were strong. I think some of that is being alarmist - even if netbooks didn’t exist, shipments would probably still be down. Companies are cutting back, and within the last few years, laptops have reached a point as far as cost versus computing power, where the benefits of upgrading fairly often for consumers has dropped substantially. It’s one thing if you are going from an old Celeron or Pentium 4-based laptop from 5 years ago to a Intel Core 2 Duo-based system, it’s another if you are already on a Core Duo or Core 2 Duo-based system. I think we’ve reached the point where people aren’t going to be compelled to upgrade as often. On top of that, you have Microsoft Windows 7 which is going to perform as well or better on existing systems that were sold with Vista (and it performs just fine on Intel Atom-based systems).

I think that it is a problem for manufacturers, but at the same time, the damage is done. It’s very clear that these devices are something that consumers are very interested in, and in many cases, they are being bought by people who may not already own a laptop for one reason or another. I can also see the fear that the NVIDIA Ion platform inspires in some - a low-end netbook/ultraportable, perhaps powered by an Intel Atom (or a VIA Nano), capable of HD graphics (even just 720p). That would absolutely impact the traditional 15″ (and now 17″) budget market. Netbooks with their current, outdated graphics systems, are already impacting the market - the demand was there, and the products to fill it simply didn’t exist, at least at a pricepoint that was affordable by mainstream consumers. As we go forward, you’ll find more people willing to forego the 15″ laptops for something in the 13″ and below range.
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Netbooks Boosting Cloud Computing?

Jason Hiner at ZDNet, has written an article, “Are netbooks quietly driving us toward cloud computing?”

He’s laid out a case that not only are netbooks/subnotebooks bucking the current trends of the PC industry (shrinking sales with some companies), but that they are poised to grow a lot more, and along the way, they are going to be bringing greater access to new technologies, especially cloud computing and cloud storage:

As a result, the limited local processing and limited local storage available on netbooks are likely to become catalysts for transferring more processing and storage to the data center, where companies such as Google, Microsoft, and Amazon are currently building up large reservoirs of computing resources.

Those three companies will certainly be beneficiaries of this trend - especially in terms of their cloud storage initiatives - but so will many other companies that host Software-as-a-Service applications, hosted storage, and cloud computing services.

We are already seeing this, with Asus offering 10GB - 20GB through their Eee Storage service.

HP is offering their “HP Upline” service with some devices that offers online data storage and backup.

Then you have third parties offering online storage services such as Dropbox which allows you to stay platform-neutral. There are clients available for the major OS platforms, as well as a web-accessible option for accessing your stored items through your browser.

Those three examples allow you to keep files in sync and backed up between multiple systems, especially important when you are using a netbook/ultraportable as a secondary device, and you don’t want to be in a situation where you have your files scattered around and they aren’t backed up, or where you are going with one of the smaller-capacity Solid State Drive (SSD) options.

There are also services like Evernote which is more oriented towards storing and syncing data (text, web clippings, documents, images). I’m a huge fan of Evernote, as are many people I know. You can have both client-based storage/syncing for those times when you are offline, and you can also access your data through a web interface. It even performs Optical Character Recognition (OCR) on images/photos that you upload, that have text somewhere in the image. You can then find that data through simple text searches.

Read: ZDNet

Laptops (Netbooks) for Accountants

AccountingWEB has put together a top-10 list of recommend laptops that was compiled last month by AccountingWEB and UK Business Forum members. Given that it was put together mostly by accountants with a need for mobility, one would expect that most of the laptops on the list would be at least 15″ and more likely up to 17″, mainly for the screen real-estate needed for viewing/editing large spreadsheets and databases.

Surprisingly, that’s not the case - they made room for some smaller laptops. A few are in fact very portable.

The 10″ Samsung NC10 and 10″ Asus Eee PC S101 were both well received.

The 12.1″ Medion Akoya S2210 (Intel Core Duo) was the winner in the budget/bargain department, along with the 13.3″ Apple MacBook taking the honors in the multimedia category.

Read: AccountingWeb.co.uk
via liliputing

Netbooks (Dell Inspiron Mini 9) and Photography

How does a netbook hold up when when compared to more conventional laptops used by professional photographers? Pretty well actually. Rob Galbraith wrote an article comparing three conventional laptops along with a netbook (Dell Inspiron Mini 9), looking at color accuracy, how useful are they in the field, etc. The Inspiron Mini 9 was compared to a late-2008 15″ MacBook Pro, the Lenovo ThinkPad W700, and an older Lenovo ThinkPad T60.

For reference, they compared them to a Eizo ColorEdge CE240W desktop display, which is color-accurate.

In regards to the Inspiron Mini 9 itself, he found that it was useful for quite a few things - browsing photos, basic photo editing, etc., although using it to convert images in a RAW format did hammer the Intel Atom CPU and is not recommended. The only major complaint was the right shift key placement.

There is a photo included showing the Mini 9 in the bottom of a backpack made for camera gear which shows you just how small they are.

As for the display of the Mini 9, they were impressed, given the $300 or so starting pricetag. It even outperformed the MacBook Pro in one test (hue accuracy). It was surprisingly accurate when it come to colors.

Read: Rob Galbraith
via jkOnTheRun

Netbooks and Screen Resolutions

Doug over at CrunchGear has written a commentary about the state of netbooks and display resolutions. It’s more of a plea to netbook makers, and I agree completely. We’ve reached a point where outside of a new platform (NVIDIA Ion) or new CPUs (dual-cores), there’s nothing else that’s really going to shake up the netbook market. You can only change the style or the placement of the buttons so many times.

Right now, the state of any resolution higher than 1024×600, but with a display smaller than 12″ is this:
- Dell Inspiron Mini 10: 10″ Not available yet, will do 1280×720p at some point.
- Gigabyte M912/912v: 8.9″, 1280×768, not available in the US.
- HP Mini 2133: Some of the earlier models had 1280×768 displays, but this line is being discontinued at some point in the near future (and some later models had the lower resolutions).
- HP Mini 2140: Either in March or April of 2009, there should be a jump up to 1366×766.
- Sony VAIOP P - 1600×768, not available yet, and priced out of the range of many buyers.

We do have these 12″ and 13″ netbook-like devices:
- Asus S121: 12.1″ 1280×800
- Dell Inspiron Mini 12: 12.1″ 1280×800,
- MSI X-Slim X320 - 13.4″ 1366×768 display. Not available yet.
- Samsung NC20 - 12.1″, 1280×800, not available yet.

This last group of 12″ and 13″ devices - they start to fall well out of the netbook category either because of size or price (or both).

For those of us who would be using a netbook for word processing or other such text-related pursuits, Doug makes a very good case for a higher resolution display:

“Why don’t I buy a regular notebook, you ask? I arrange letters into words for a living. I could do this with a DX2/66. All I need is a cheap, light, portable computer for word processing that lets me see most or all of the three or four paragraphs I’m cobbling together. My life is almost entirely “in the cloud” so don’t need a big hard drive, a fancy OS, or lots of RAM — just a decent screen. Watching me type up a post on a netbook is like having front row seats at Scroll-Down-a-Palooza or Scroll-a-Thon-2009 or Scrollerblade Camp.”

I’ve been thinking about this myself - out of that group of devices listed above, the HP Mini 2140 looks like it will probably be the best choice if you want 10″ or less. I really want an Asus Eee PC T91 tablet/convertible (or something similar), but I could probably get a lot more use out of a 2140.

My perfect netbook at this point, putting aside the T91, would be an HP Mini 2140 with a dual-core Atom and the 1366×766. Those two things would sell me instantly on such a device. Should the 2140 be under $600 with that display, even with the current single-core Atoms, I think HP will find a winner on its hands among those of us who need a higher resolution and a good keyboard.

Read: CrunchGear

MacBooks and FireWire: Steve Jobs’ Response

A few days ago, I had a long-winded rant about Apple dropping FireWire from the new MacBooks. A lot of other people have been ranting about it as well, going by Discussions.Apple.com and various other blogs and Mac-oriented forums.

Steve Jobs has responded to one Mac user: “Actually, all of the new HD camcorders of the past few years use USB 2” and followed it up with “The new HD camcorders start around $500“.

That’s typical Jobs - he doesn’t mince words, but I think Apple should have handled it better or should have been a lot more upfront. I was in an Apple Store last week, and while waiting, twice I heard Apple Store employees pushing FireWire devices (external hard drives). An ExpressCard slot would have been the best solution. In the past, when they retired a standard, you knew it. There was no doubt, because Apple made a big issue out of it.

Now people are finding out that Apple is phasing out FireWire from emails sent by Steve Jobs on his iPhone.

Read:
AppleInsider

Apple MacBook Redesigned

Now that we’ve seen the new 13.3″ Apple MacBook and are reassured of Steve Jobs’ health, let’s take a look at what your $1,299 or $1,599 is going to get you. Be warned, I have a long-winded rant about the removal of the FireWire port at the end.

It’s going to get you a very nicely designed notebook (that appears to be sturdy). It’s environmentally-friendly to boot (which matters to some). It’s got a decent graphics chipset that even supports Apple’s new 30″ Cinema displays (which just so happen to have cables to charge your MacBook without you having to take your A/C MagSafe adapter out of your bag). It’s got LED-backlighting, and you even get the option of adding a 128GB Solid State Drive (SSD).

It also gets you an incredibly cool multi-touch touchpad that’s glass, yes glass, that actually acts like a button (it is the button - there are no separate buttons). You can even use four-finger gestures for certain actions. This was the most interesting thing to me (even more so than the design). I’m looking forward to getting my hands on one in my local Apple Store.

It’s a great looking notebook brought up to date, but for every two steps forward, there’s one or two steps back, and some of these are real head-scratchers.

Here comes the long-winded rant about FireWire - you’ve been warned!
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