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back to article Acer Aspire One: the new sub-laptop to beat?

Early reviews of Acer's £220 Aspire One were none too complementary about the Small, Cheap Computer's build quality, but have spent a brief time with a unit that's not a pre-production model, we'd say Eee PC creator Asus has a real challenge on its hands. We've not had time to conduct a full review - our unit's on the way, …

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  1. Graeme

    Release date?

    any news as to when this is out in the UK?

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  2. Gildas
    Heart

    Release date

    amazon.co.uk have it down for Aug 11, play.com for Aug 7th. Both want £219.99 for the base version.

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  3. waxsta
    Unhappy

    Date Moved

    Just noticed Play has shifted the date from 25th July to 7th August. Also the basic version on Play.com is £229 not £219. Amazon is the cheapest for the base version (512 ram 8gb SSD HDD)

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  4. jon

    bigger battery

    Any news on when/how/how much the larger battery will be available?

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  5. adamj
    Go

    available today

    Like many people I've been hanging back waiting for an eee901 but I noticed the Aspire One has appeared on display in my local branch of PC World (Tunbridge Wells). The guy on the counter confirmed that they had 8 of them in stock (blue linux 8Gb).

    The sample on display looked really quite good. The only snag is they've priced it at £249, which seems to be an uplift on the RRP for the base model.

    They also had a plainer-looking own brand Advent machine with 80Gb hard drive for £279 (winXP).

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  6. Greg Miller
    Thumb Down

    Available now in PC World...:-)

    My gf bought one the other day for £249.99 and I checked it out.

    1. Reasonable build-quality;

    2. Impressive sceen - quite awesome I would say;

    3. Keyboard a bit flexy;

    4. Battery life about 2.5 hours - maybe a tad more after time;

    5. Linpus Linux is naff IMHO. Few apps and the usual hassle installing more/updating etc. Linux geeks will be okay with this though...if they can get a connection to the update server (which we couldn't);

    6. Will run Win XP Pro SP2 fine (we tried it). Drivers from Acer Thai site;

    7. Webcam is rubbish (only 0.3 megapixels);

    8. Under Linpus neither the internal nor an external mic will record sound to local apps like webcam (apparently mics only work with Skype and Messaging services). An external mic works ok with XP Pro. But sound quality is awful. The internal mic still produces only a hissing noise. Even in the highest quality setting webcam video was dead jerky. So altogether webcam is pretty useless;

    9. Connected effortlessly to local WLAN;

    10. Easy to restore damaged installations. Will boot from a USB stick. Instructions included;

    11. Documentation extremely sparse;

    12. Acer UK support is virtually non-existent. No one there had 'even seen an Aspire One yet'. So they couldn't help. We were invited to call a premium rate number next day for more info. Although the hardware is guaranteed for a year, the software is not, apparently, guaranteed at all. So you has to pay plenty for help with it;

    13. Sapphire Blue colour looks really cool.

    In summary quite a dinky little unit and just about acceptable - to some perhaps - for the originally intended launch price of £199. But, given the above, way OTT at £250. So - back to the shop it went, and she's now saving for an Asus eeePc 901. A wise move methinks.

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