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By N2H
When we reviewed the latest 10-inch Aspire One, we complained about the tiny touchpad. With the A0751h’s slightly wider footprint, however, comes a wider touchpad (2.5 x 1.6 inches), which was a pleasant improvement over the AOD250’s 2.0 x 1.5-inch pad. It’s still fairly short, though, especially compared to the NB205’s (3.1 x 1.6 inches) enormous touchpad
One thing the AO751h offers that most of its 10-inch competitors don’t is a high-res screen. Whereas the 1005HA, NB205, and 10-inch Apsire One all have displays with 1024 x 600-pixel resolution, the AO751h’s 11.6-inch display has a resolution of 1366 x 768. Those extra vertical pixels, in particular, mean you won’t have to scroll down as often when you’re viewing pages, a common inconvenience with netbooks
The netbook comes with an embedded 1.3-MP webcam. In a Skype chat, our friend reported minimal latency with better colors and brightness than on his Apple iSight camera
When we list a netbook’s specs we sound like a broken record: almost all have 1GB of RAM, Windows XP Home, a 160GB hard drive, and either a 1.6-GHZ or 1.66-GHz Intel Atom processor. The AO751h has most of these same components, except for the processor. Instead, this netbook has a 1.33-GHz Intel Atom Z520 CPU.
Although clock speed isn’t always the be-all and end-all of computing power, in this case the performance delta was obvious. The AO751h’s PCMark05 score of 1,080 trails the scores of its competitors, including the NB205 (1,496) and the 10-inch Acer Aspire One (1,492), which has a 1.6-GHz Intel Atom N270 CPU. Its boot time of 46 seconds, however, was right in line with both the 1005HA (47 seconds) and the 10-inch Aspire One (49 seconds).
Source - laptopmag.com
User reviews @ www.testfreaks.co.uk
Related product from Amazon.co.uk
Comments
I am annoyed that the netbooks with high-res screens always seemed to be paired with the slower Atom processors.
Is Intel imposing some kind of rules on netbook manufacturers to cripple netbooks that might compete too well against traditional laptops?
Dell’s Mini 10 has the same issue as this new AspireOne.
I would love to see a 10 or 11 inch high-res screen paired with a dual core 1.66 Atom. And I could imagine the price point wouldn’t be lower than the bottom range for 15-inch bargain laptops.
Pros:
- Beautiful screen with great horizontal viewing angles
- Full-size keyboard
- Lightweight (2.7 lbs with three cell battery)
- Only slightly larger than many 10″ netbooks and significantly thinner than many of those 10″ models
- Very sharp looking machine
- Reasonably solid in terms of build quality
Cons:
- Slower 1.33 GHz processor
- Flash videos from YouTube and Hulu are choppy (dropped frames and stuttering). This is a problem with most netbooks, but a little worse here because of the 1.33 GHz processor.
- three cell battery only gives a bit over 3 hrs of runtime (the 6-cell would fix this, but would stick out of the rear of the case a bit)
- touchpad rocker button is harder to push than it should be
- touchpad surface has some drag (turn the pointer speed up to help with this)
- keyboard keys are very flat (I got used to this and grew to love the keyboard, others may object).
- arrow keys are tiny, despite full-size keyboard
- ships with lots of bloatware and trial software pre-installed
- Graphics chipset is not Linux friendly. Don’t expect full graphics acceleration in Linux anytime soon.
- Fingerprints show easily on the glossy case
The reviewer failed to mention that the AO751h actually ships with 2G RAM and a 250G SATA hard drive.
The slower CPU bugs me. I just don’t get it. It makes no sense to put a more demanding OS(Vista) on a machine and ship it with a less powerful CPU. It’s be tantamount to spec’ing an International Lonestar with a Ford Powerstroke engine. It might get the job done, but it’s going to be a long, painful drive.
The bloatware, while a pain to get rid of, is to be expected from any almost OEM.
Both problems are remedied by an installation of Slackware. It’ll take a bit of work, but you’ll get a more resource-friendly OS and the bloatware(including Vista) goes away.
With Intel providing proper graphics drivers in recent X releases, graphics shouldn’t be a problem.
Will update.
Initially the wireless networking was very sluggish, and the system locked up frequently – requiring a power off and reboot. A visit to Acer’s website yielded lots of new drivers and a new BIOS. After installing these the networking was much improved, but the system continued to lock up on a regular basis. Laptop computer sales
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