A New User's Thoughts

I bought my first AAO about 3 months ago. I did this on impulse, I had been looking at the EEE and fully expected to buy that, but they had a sale on the Aspire One at the local OfficeWorks and the specs seemed better and well, it has the advantage of looking beautiful. I went for the SSD version with Linux because I do a lot of work at night and even the tiniest fan can sound like a hurricane in the dark hours. Unboxed, the thing disappointed me from the get go. The touchpad was, in a word: horrendous. Taps were unpredictable, the system ability to fine tune it was woeful, and the mouse buttons on either side were small, awkwardly placed and had an especially nasty resistance to pressure. I figured this might be an adjustment problem on my part and that given time I would get used to it. A week and many lost tabs later I was even more infuriated. And then the OS... Now let me first say I understand the linux OS is aimed at two quite different types of users. Firstly the person who wants a bare minimum of features and is happy to go with the preset applications straight out of the box. Secondly, the power user who has time and inclination towards tweaking. I am neither of those. What I needed was fast, easy operation that was flexible. I download a LOT of apps and move stuff backwards and forwards across machines so the process of loading apps was to me a real irritation. Not a fault of the linux boxed AAO of course: it does what it says it will do. But it wasn't for me. After a week these issues, along with the very noisy, cheap, clacking sounding keyboard, I was headed back to the store with the machine for an upgrade to the 120G HDD version with XP. Amazingly, the added cost still had the machine beating the field for value.

This needs to be said: The two machines are very different.

The touchpad on my new machine works perfectly. The side click buttons are however still irritatingly ill placed and too small, but at least they respond to normal touch consistently. I understand the side buttons are for reasons of space but I simply don't see it as necessary. Acer could easily place the buttons conventionally. The keyboard has none of the rattles the SSD version had. The difference in weight is noticeable. The fan is noisy but still (just) within tolerance. XP works fine, about 50 seconds from cold boot thru to everything loaded and being online. (Literally seconds if you keep the machine on standby: this doesn't seem to consume much battery life either.) For a small machine everything works quite fast- kudos to Intel for the Atom.

I am very happy with my AAO in its current configuration and prefer to use it for almost everything ahead of my other machines.

Things I'd like to see in future versions:

1. Touch screen.
2. Normal touchpad
3. A spring loaded lid. Currently, because the machine is so light, one hand has to hold the lower part in order to lift the top.
4. Some kind of hand or finger holds on the under or back side so the AAO can be held securely in one hand while using the other to use the touchpad. This needn't be anything dramatic- some indentation on the back side of the screen would do. ATM I do what the manual says not to, and that is slip my fingers in the gap between the two halves. With a mild spring 'flip', the left hand could then open and close the machine without juggling.
5. Longer battery time. (Done already?)

My feeling is that if Acer can add those features to the existing machine without a cost blowout, they will pretty much have aced it for me.