Acer Aspire One 532 If you thought the netbook market was already flooded, Intel’s recently-launched 'Pine Trail' platform means you can expect another new batch to come through. We’ve already seen Asus’ take on Pine Trail with the Eee PC 1005PE - reviewed here. Now we have Acer’s Aspire One 532h. Acer Aspire One 532 Acer's Aspire One 532: ' …
As per usual, there are many flavours of the 532h, mine comes standard with 160Gb worth of hard drive real estate, but it does indeed work with 2Gb ram. No idea what the review is on about, unless they used different motherboards as well.
Like the review model, mine does not come with Bluetooth or a 3G interface, however, 3G models are indeed available here in australia for an additional AU$70 or so. I presume bluetooth would come with that as well.
No biggie. I knobbled an internal bluetooth interface, as well as RS232 which I use on a semi-regular basis to configure routers and switches. This saves on the dongles and cables I have to carry, which is a huge help for me. And yes, if you're wondering, for me voiding my warranty is a sport.
Price however, is very different here. I bought mine for AU$349 (with the cashback offer), which is a lot less than the AU$495 or so (converted from 300 quid). That said, I understand the recommended retail here is around the $500 mark, which sort of makes sense, if it were not for the fact that many sell it much cheaper anyway.
Yet another yawn inspiring run-of-the-mill craptastic "netbook".
Where-o-where are the ARM netbooks we were promised o-so long ago?
Have the Wintel cartel managed to kill them off or are they still coming RSN?
On the subject of netbooks, I tried to buy a nettop on the weekend. Specifically an Acer Revo 3610. How hard do you think that was? They seem to be virtually unknown in Aus, the "Find where to buy me" button on the Acer website led straight to a 404 page.
The only places offering them for sale were the various "shopbot" subscribers of unknown quality, all offering the device starting from $570AU. Without exception this came with a mandatory copy of Windows.
Eventually I resorted to ebay. They have them on there coming from a seller in Taiwan for $320AU without the Windows Tax. It remains to be seen whether the thing arrives but I have seen people mention in forums that they have purchased these through ebay without issue so I will wait and see.
Why do these people make it so hard to purchase their products?
Just received my HP mini 5102 yesterday. N450 (1.66GHz), 1366x768 display (10", LED), 2GB ram and 320GB disk (7200rpm). Beats the acer one easily. Review it, you'll like it. Only one complaint: fingerprint magnet.
It came with windows 7 but that was soon replaced by Ubuntu 10.4 beta :)
At £300 you're kind of at the cross-over point between a netbook and a low end laptop. I bought a gateway laptop for example for 'er indoors with a widescreen display and DVD writer for £350.
At £300, I'm tempted to say it's a bit too expensive, I'd rather stump up the extra ca$h and get a laptop.
My earlier model Acer Aspire One was only £197 from Asda. At that price, SOLD, no arguments, but £300...? No ta!
It's a problem raised before on such forums... er.. fora... er.. whatever... as these in that one of the main ideas behind the original netbook was to produce something that was smaller, lighter and cheaper than a full blown laptop. I bought my own Aspire One last year as a clearance item from PC World and, apart from replacing the rather tame Linpus offering with openSUSE 11.1, it did all the above at around £170. At the £300 mark, I'm more likely to go looking for a low spec laptop.
The only operational gripe (aesthetically, I do wish these sodding companies would stop it with the piano gloss finish on such machines is it is totally impractical) I had about my own N270 based machine was the appalling arrangement of the touchpad and buttons, a fault that Acer still doesn't seem to have grasped with this bobbly pad arrangement on this new model. Other than that, and allowing for the fact that the review machine has a standard drive as opposed to my own system's 16GB SSD, there is little to choose between them. That being the case, I know which one I would choose and, since I already have it, I hardly think that I'm likely to change!
I've an 10 inch Eee (ok, no, 2 Eee's actually) and have found the 10 inchers pretty ok to use. Can't say anything about this specific model, I think lappies are like shoes, you really need to try em on first, but what I'd probably object to is the glossy screen.
I hate glossy screens.
Absolutely hate them.
I just purchased my Aspire One 532h-2Cr in Bangkok a few days ago. It cost the equivilent of £205 and came with a 250GB HDD & 1GB RAM, bluetooth was also included. There is no Microsoft Tax in that price as it came with something called Linpus Linux. This I wiped and replaced with Ubuntu 9.10 as soon as I got back to my hotel room! Just upgraded the RAM today to 2GB, a Kingston PC2-6400 (800MHz) module and its working great, so I don't understand why Acer in the UK has put, what seems to me, to be an artificial cap on the RAM amount in the system.
I would have liked the higher def 1280*720 screen, but that wasn't availible where I was shopping, and would have probably been significantly more expensive as well. As far as the keyboard goes, it is one of the best I've seen on any Netbook. I have quite fat fingers, but I'm able to touch type with out any problem on the Aspire's keyboard, which is more that can be said for most Netbooks that I've tried. Admittedly the keyboard on mine is an International one, not UK specific, so all of the 'problem' keys mentioned in the article are fine on my keyboard. As for the touchpad, I've never been a fan of this type of pointing device, so I'm using a Microsoft Arc Mouse with the Aspire, which works well for me. I'm happy to carry the mouse, especially as it folds up pretty small, along with me.
Over all I'm really happy with this system, especially now that I've upgraded the RAM and have Ubuntu desktop (not netbook remix) installed.
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