Commentary

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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Things to Like and Dislike About the Acer Aspire One

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Kevin Tofel over at jkOnTheRun has posted five things he likes and five things he doesn’t like about the 8.9-inch Acer Aspire One. Among the likes: Build quality, the display, and the battery life. Among the dislikes: Upgrading the memory on the Aspire One and … Read more

Netbooks hurting Laptop Sales?

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Are netbooks hurting laptop sales? It’s certainly an interesting question to ponder. There is definitely a segment of the existing “mainstream” (I hate that word these days, but it’s appropriate here) laptop market that would either benefit from a netbook / sub-notebook, or at the … Read more

ThinkPad SL Series – Where it Fits in

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Over on the Design Matters blog, an official Lenovo blog / website, David Hill, one of the members of the Lenovo ThinkPad team, has posted an article / commentary that has attracted a lot of attention and debate. It concerns the recently announced ThinkPad SL … Read more

A Mac Tablet This Fall?

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So is Apple going to finally produce some form of touchscreen Tablet PC? AppleInsider and MacDailyNews both have some interesting news, one in the form of Apple’s quarterly finance call yesterday, and the other in the form of rumors.

AppleInsider reported that Apple’s CFO, Peter Oppenheimer, was planning an important “product transition” sometime between July and September of this year, a transition that will have ramifications going into next year, at least as far as Apple’s profit margains.

This mysterious product will have “technologies and features that others can’t match,” according to Oppenheimer.

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