Acer

Acer Aspire One at Best Buy

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Acer Aspire One It looks like more of the price drops for the 8.9″ Acer Aspire One netbook / sub-notebook are starting to pop up, and this time in a retail store in the US.

Best Buy prominently features the Acer Aspire One in today’s (Sunday) flyer. They are calling it an “Exclusive”.

Specifications:
– Model: A0A150-1570
– Windows XP Home
– 1GB of RAM
– 120GB HDD

The SKU shown is 8967335, however it doesn’t yet show up in their online laptop area . When Circuit City started carrying Aspire Ones, many stores didn’t have the hardware needed to display the Aspire Ones (the security hardware that is) because they were much smaller than their normal laptops, and you had to ask somebody to get you one. The same maybe true of Best Buy – they may not be out on display just yet in the actual store. Keep in mind they only guarantee three per store.

This is going to be big over the long term – now that many consumers can get exposed to these things, at this price point, it’s going to force other companies to drop their prices, and more importantly, as many have said, this will be the shove that netbooks need to really become mainstream machines.

Below is the ad:

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Acer Drops Pricing on Aspire One, Intros New Model

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Yesterday I talked about netbook pricing and how Acer (and Lenovo) seemed to have hit the sweet spot with prices for their netbooks hovering around $375 – $430. Well, and I swear I had no prior knowledge of this, Acer has decided to drop the … Read more

Netbooks, Pricing, and the Used Market

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Asus Eee PC 904 I’ve written about this in the past – the pricing of some netbooks / sub-notebooks and how some of them seemed a bit high. Now we are reaching a point where there is some real competition (from Acer and Lenovo). Last month, we saw a $100 rebate on certain 8.9″ Intel Mobile Celeron-powered Asus Eee PC 900 models. It went on for the full month at several online retailers in the US and it dropped the price below $450 in some cases.

The same $100 rebate (or rather a new one) is currently available on some models at Amazon.com through the end of the month. It’s also showing up for various models of the Asus Eee PC 900 at MWave.com as well as at Buy.com, and OnSale.com. A quick check of Amazon UK as well as a few other distributors in Europe doesn’t show the rebates (or price drops), but I’m sure we’ll see something in regards to pricing at some point.

With September coming up in less than a few weeks, and with the Acer Aspire One available now (at $379 and $399), and the Lenovo IdeaPad S10 shipping in September for around $430 (and presumably the Dell Inspiron 910), it really makes me wonder when Asus is going to permanently drop the price on these things (as well as drop the prices on their Atom-based lines, along with MSI on the Wind netbooks).

I’m not going to debate the pros and cons of the Intel Mobile Celeron in these things versus the Intel Atoms in the Asus Eee 901 (and the above mentioned Acer and Lenovo models). The average consumer that this market is oriented towards is not going to know the difference or care. I take that back. They’ll hear “1.6GHz Atom versus 900MHz Celeron” or “120GB HDD versus 20GB SSD” and they’ll respond accordingly.

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Acer Aspire One – Replacing SSD with 1.8″ HDD

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A few days ago we mentioned that tnkgirl Mobile had been modding their SSD-based 1.8″ Acer Aspire One to handle bluetooth. Now they’ve since published a how-to guide (complete with lots of pictures). The SSD is slightly smaller in the area where storage is located, … Read more

First Impressions of Acer Aspire One (SL)

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Acer Aspire One I mentioned yesterday that I had an Acer Aspire One arriving, specifically the hard drive version of the 8.9-inch netbook.

Well it arrived yesterday afternoon, and I’ve had a chance to go through a few charge cycles and give it a good work out both last night and this morning on the way to work. This is a bit longer than most “first impressions”, but it’s due to the fact that I was able to do quite a bit right out of the box with it.

Construction
First off, the construction of the Aspire One. The build quailty feels very well made. It doesn’t feel like there is any wasted space. That said, now that I understand what’s involved in upgrading the memory and hard drive, I believe I’ll wait until this weekend. Both definitely need to be done at the same time. You don’t want to be taking the rubber feet off to get to the screws more than once.

It is incredibly lightweight – much lighter than I initially expected. I will trade off some weight for increased battery life, no problem, so moving to a six-cell battery when they come out (other than the price) won’t be an issue. The footprint of the Aspire One won’t be increasing too much.

Keyboard
The keyboard is solid and has no real give or flex. I would like a bigger Enter / Return key plus a larger delete key, but such is the sacrifices we make for something this small. I was surprised at how fast I was able to acclimate to typing on something that small.

Touchpad
I’m still getting used to the button placement on either side. The touchpad scrolling and zoom in and zoom out features are taking some getting used to. The touchpad scrolling works just fine with most websites as long as you pay attention to keeping your finger along the right side. Scrolling with Google Docs and Evernote works just fine as well. The touchpad buttons are a little loud – I find myself double-tapping on the touchpad rather than clicking on the buttons.

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