Is The Aspire One Really "The One"?

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Andysan

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Hi all, i really need some reassurance that thee Aspire One is "The One" (pardon the pun) please as i'm starting to have my doubts! :o

I am comparing t against the EEE 701 as they are similarly priced, and the One looked to have it all sewn up - better looks, better CPU, quicker boot-time, 2x SD slots etc... but now i am not so sure.

I really want my netbook so that i can enable extra functionality - download apps, tweak the UI to my hearts content etc... and it sounds like the 701's Xandros OS is better tailored to this. I appreciate that its early days yet, but the Linpus OS seems comparatively locked down and with little support in comparison. :o

Also, all i've heard in the last few months is how the Atom is going to rock, but now i'm hearing that it's not so hot, and actually less powerful than the 600mhz Celeron in the 700. :oops:

On the face of it, it looks so promising and so good, but now i'm not so sure that it is - can any owners of the Aspire One offer some advice please!

Many thanks indeed! :mrgreen:
 
If you want to stay with the supplied OS, the EeePC's build is superior to the Aspire's Linpus build - Linpus gives you no way to connect to SMB shares without using a commandline smb client for instance. I also would rather not live without being able to load the tun driver to connect to my openvpn network, and Linpus doesn't have the tun driver baked in, so without kernel source I can't build a custom loadable module.

If you install Ubuntu on the Aspire, you will be much happier with it than the Eee, due to the Acer's better display, keyboard and processor.

I have 1G ram in my Aspire One, with Ubuntu 8.04.1 loaded. I run Win3k3 Server in vmware-player running Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server Tools and it's acceptably responsive. That would not be possible on my 7" Eee (not sure about the 900).

For me, it's the One. I may well stop lugging around my Dell 9400.
 
I have an EeePC 701, and I'm planning on upgrading to the Aspire One at some point just to get the larger, higher-resolution screen. 800x480 is just a little too small for a lot of modern applications.

As far as processing power... at a full 900MHz, the Celeron in the EeePC beats out the Atom in the only benchmark I've found; but at the stock underclocked 630MHz, I think the Atom probably has the edge. I think the graphics chip in the A1 is a step up, too.
 
glibdud said:
I have an EeePC 701, and I'm planning on upgrading to the Aspire One at some point just to get the larger, higher-resolution screen. 800x480 is just a little too small for a lot of modern applications.
Click to expand...

I agree with glibdud on this one. I considered buying the 701 for some time but I was put off by the tiny screen. The size was bad enough but the resolution really is just too small to be usable.

The vertical resolution of the One (600 pixels) is still smaller than I would like but I have to accept some compromises in something this cheap and portable.

The One does have some real competitors, particularly the MSI Wind, but the 701 is not one of them.
 
Andysan said:
Hi all, i really need some reassurance that thee Aspire One is "The One" (pardon the pun) please as i'm starting to have my doubts! :o

I am comparing t against the EEE 701 as they are similarly priced, and the One looked to have it all sewn up - better looks, better CPU, quicker boot-time, 2x SD slots etc... but now i am not so sure.

I really want my netbook so that i can enable extra functionality - download apps, tweak the UI to my hearts content etc... and it sounds like the 701's Xandros OS is better tailored to this. I appreciate that its early days yet, but the Linpus OS seems comparatively locked down and with little support in comparison. :o

Also, all i've heard in the last few months is how the Atom is going to rock, but now i'm hearing that it's not so hot, and actually less powerful than the 600mhz Celeron in the 700. :oops:

On the face of it, it looks so promising and so good, but now i'm not so sure that it is - can any owners of the Aspire One offer some advice please!
Click to expand...

I'm a former eee 701 owner (I bought it in January and sold it a few days ago). I dual-booted the stock Xandros (tweaked to make to use the regular XFCE menus) and eeeXbuntu, and I mostly used the latter. If you're a tweaker and like to download lots of software, I expect you would abandon the default Xandros OS pretty quickly as well, and load on some other OS. My eee was great - I loved its amazing portability and that fact that it could run almost any linux software. But it had two significant drawbacks: the keyboard is hard to get used to, and the 7 inch screen made some things difficult because of the small size.

I just got my Aspire One earlier this week, but I've already gone ahead and sold my eee on craigslist. There's no comparison. First, they keyboard on the Aspire One is much easier to use. And the 9 inch screen makes all the difference in the world. Having said that, Linpus has not impressed me so far, and so I'm replacing it with Ubuntu 8.04.1. But since I also did not use the default OS on the eee much, that's not much of a drawback. If you're a tweaker, you'll do the same, whichever one you buy.

But really, you're making an unfair comparison. In the U.S., at least, the eee 900 (already displaced by the 901) costs about the same as the Aspire One (at Newegg, $379 for the Aspire One and $399 for the eee 900). At least with the eee 900, you're doing a bit more of an apples-to-apples comparison, since the eee 900 has a 9 inch screen - but still the small keyboard. The eee 901 has an atom processor, like the Aspire One, but costs significantly more.

In my mind, there is only one reason one would consider the eee 701 over the Aspire One right now - the eee has a substantially bigger user community than the Aspire One does yet, and so there is much more support available. (If you have any doubt, take a look at eeeuser.com and see for yourself.) But I expect that to change as the Aspire One becomes more widely available, and as I said, it only took me a couple of days with my Aspire One before I sold my eee 701.

Best regards,

Tom
 
I think the Aspire One is the "One" (in Matrix terminology). I have always owned an ultraportable, but didn't jump on to the netbook bandwagon until I saw the Aspire One was available for under $400. At such a price point, there's not that much to lose, so I went ahead and got one.

If it influences your decision, check out the Youtube videos I posted up yesterday. I'll post links to my Photobucket Account once I upload those pics too.

http://www.youtube.com/user/Kev50027

http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v367/Kev50027/Stuff/Acer Aspire One/?albumview=grid
 
Finally a decent size portable netbook i mean the wind and 1000h is nice but the point is to be portable any since im in the us and waitin for the windows one i was wonderin does the aspire one display full web pages like the 10 inch can if it can then this is the one i want to get when it gets out oh and is the windows for the us gonna be 399
Thnx for the help and yes im new here but ive been browsin the site for the last couple days
 
Since Aspire One is a 8.9inch, shouldn't you compare it with a Eee 900 or 901? That's what I myself am trying to decide between (and the 1000/100H as well).
 
I own and have sold a dozen Eee701s in my area, don't be so quick to trash them. At least they have a door for easy RAM upgrade, and though the screen res isn't that good the text is readable. I just got my first Acer One and the first thing I noted is how difficult it is to read the tiny display!
The keyboard is nicer on the One, the display brighter, the OEM OS is not so "Fisher Price" and the price is right. The Atom powered Eee are significantly more expensive.

Now I'll wait for someone to post an Ubuntu-One ISO
 
1000H is actually closer in spec to A1 than 900 or 901, because of HD and xP. Both A1 and 1000H have different strengths, if you want max battery life go with A1, for slightly easier typing and viewing go with 1000H. I actually got both (for family) and each love their perspective machines. Also looked at the 10" Wind but felt kind of flimsy to me (and keyboard kind clickety too).
 
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