Acer Aspire One Review

Even though I am a Mac person, I had to join the PC brigade once I saw the price of the Acer Aspire One drop below $300 at my local Costco. I used to travel with my 12-inch titanium Macbook (they don't make it anymore), which was easy to slip into my carry-on, but it was also quite heavy. This Acer is even smaller (about 7X10) and weighs in at a miniscule 2.2 pounds. It's an amazingly convenient device to take on the road.

The machine fires up surprisingly quickly, but the processor is a bit slow (1.6GH vs. 2.13GH on my new 13-inch MacBook), and you may find yourself waiting a bit for programs and web pages to load.

The screen is admittedly small, but it's no problem to use for answering email and reading (especially since so many people are reading and writing on their iPhones and BBerrys these days already). Ditto for the keyboard -- it's very useable, but you will fat finger keys pretty regularly. I also like the battery life, which runs about 4 hours for me. And while there is no CD drive (how do you think they keep it so light), so much of my stuff is now on clouds that it really doesn't matter and downloading software wirelessly is easy.

I guess my biggest complaint is that you have to buy a bunch of software before you can really use it -- including Office and virus protection. I think I spent about $100 on a 1-year license, which pushes the overall cost up, but still not into entry-level Mac range.

If you're looking for a portable travel machine to do serious graphics work or the like on, then this is obviously not the one for you. However, if you want to travel with something that gives you a bigger screen than your hand-held to surf the web, answer email and write, then it's a bargain and a keeper.