Acer Aspire One AO751h reviewed — sweet battery life, sad CPU marks
Acer’s 11.6-inch netbook — the Aspire One 751h — has been available Stateside since mid-May, and Laptop’s spent some quality time with it, delivering a full review. Overall, they found the nice, large screen to be welcoming, and the battery life (on their 6-cell configuration) was fantastic — clocking in at over seven hours. They were, however, pretty disappointed in the 1.22-GHz Intel Atom Z520 CPU, finding it to really slow the unit down. They note that other similarly priced models boast better processors, and might be a smarter choice. The Aspire One 751h runs $399 with a 3-cell battery, and $449 for the 6-cell version. Hit up the read link for the full review. One more shot after the break.
Keyboard
Like the Aspire Timeline AS3810T, the Aspire One A0751h has raised keys, whose plastic has a slightly textured feel. The layout is close to full size, and we appreciate that the right Shift key is full size and in the proper place. Touch typists will have no problem with this netbook, but we noticed that the keyboard flexed as we pounded out responses to IMs.
Design
If you’ve seen the 10-inch Aspire One AOD250, the 11.6-inch version will look familiar. It, too, has a glossy black lid with Acer’s metal logo impressed in the lower corner; the lid picks up fingerprints fairly easily. Like the slightly more upscale Timeline series, it has a gray palm rest and keyboard deck with a black keyboard and thin bezel to match.
As with the Timeline series, the overall effect is conservative, but not cheap-looking. The real cornerstone of the Aspire One’s design is not the color scheme anyway, but its thinness. Whereas its competitors, such as the ASUS Eee PC 1005HA, can be as thick as 1.4 inches and weigh close to 3 pounds (the 1005HA weighs 2.8), the Aspire One has a minimal footprint of 11.2 x 7.8 x 1.0 inches, although it weighs 3 pounds (and 3.6 with its adapter). In the hand, it feels just slightly heavier than the Toshiba mini NB205, but that’s offset somewhat by the thinner build.
The only catch: its six-cell battery juts out the back, whereas some netbooks, such as the Eee PC 1005HA, have comparably sized batteries that are more flush with the system (and manage to deliver longer battery life, to boot. More on that later).
Touchpad and Touch Button
When we reviewed the latest 10-inch Aspire One, we complained about the tiny touchpad. With the A0751h’s slightly wider footprint, however, comes a wider touchpad (2.5 x 1.6 inches), which was a pleasant improvement over the AOD250’s 2.0 x 1.5-inch pad. It’s still fairly short, though, especially compared to the NB205’s (3.1 x 1.6 inches) enormous touchpad.
We have a bigger concern the single touch button, which we found too stiff and narrow. Aside from the stiffness, we would have preferred two buttons, as there are on the NB205 and other netbooks.
Display and Sound
One thing the AO751h offers that most of its 10-inch competitors don’t is a high-res screen. Whereas the 1005HA, NB205, and 10-inch Apsire One all have displays with 1024 x 600-pixel resolution, the AO751h’s 11.6-inch display has a resolution of 1364 x 768. Those extra vertical pixels, in particular, mean you won’t have to scroll down as often when you’re viewing pages, a common inconvenience with netbooks.
We were immediately impressed by the screen’s brightness. When we watched a Saturday Night Live sketch on Hulu.com we enjoyed pleasant colors and, moreover, good viewing angles even from oblique side angles. The glossy finish limited our viewing angles from the front, however, when we dipped the lid forward slightly we were still able to make out the clip. By the time we got to a 45-degree angle, however, the screen appeared washed out.
The volume, as you would expect with a netbook, is weak. Watching a clip in a quiet room with the netbook right in front of us, the sound was never too loud. Music, too, sounded predictably tinny, but no worse than it does on other netbooks: the bass in “Seven Nation Army” by The White Stripes, for instance, was distant.
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