Acer Aspire One D250 Acer made a significant impact on the netbook market last year with its hugely popular Aspire One A110. It recently released a selection of new netbooks in its Aspire One range, and the D250 we have here is bizarrely similar to the D150, which was only launched a couple of months ago. Acer Aspire One D250 Acer's Aspire One …
I've read through the whole review, and I'm struggling to work out where they've improved this over the original AA1. The accessibility of the HD and RAM could come in handy for some I guess. They've shaved a whole 0.14 inches off the height, so it's hardly supermodel skinny.
I would still go for the Acer Aspire One whilst the limited few are still available. As Chippy says, the price was the best part about it.
If it got damaged you wouldn't be too bothered as long as you have a data backup, and any cosmetic damage isn't anything to worry about. Where as on your £900 laptop, you're probably going to be pretty gutted if it gets damaged even cosmetically.
There are still a few A110 left in Comet and the odd Currys store, but selling out VERY quickly at £180 a pop.
If a netbook is less than £200, you buy it and live with it's foibles. Hence my AA1, for which I paid £175. So what if it's a bit sluggish and the battery life is poor.
If a netbook is £329, you start to wonder whether for another fifty quid you could get a decent sized screen and keyboard.
We seem to be losing sight of the what the first C meant in SCC !
Lets not all forget acer were the company who shipped a dll/ocx control that allowed *anyone*
to embed the control in thier web page and run *any* command as admin on your machine
without detection by any of the then current av scanners.
No comment from the AV companies we are supposed to trust....
At the time I had to boot with a linux live disk, scan my machine and remove this DLL and
hunt for any other infections that may have been loaded by this Acer crapware.
Acers response at the time was (to paraphrase) "tough doodoo".
I love my travelmate but I would never ever trust Acer to ship a windows box without a
manufactered backdoor that is undetected/unreported by a commercial AV package.
So what is to differentiate this from the original AAO or any other of the netbooks out there?
I can still pickup an A110 for £170 with a 16GB SSD and Linux. For double the price you get an inch extra screen but no more resolution, Windows (a downgrade for many), HD rather than SSD and its 4mm thinner but bigger in every other dimension.
So double the price and frankly not a single reason I would buy one of these over the original model.
When are these manufacturers going to realise that sub-xga screens are one of the biggest limiting factors on these netbooks. Of course, a cynic might say that it's a deliberate policy to keep distance from the more expensive ultra-light notebooks. I'll be sticking to my 4 year old fleabay Latitude X1 cos it has everything a netbook has with a 1280x800 screen.
eeepc was small & cheap. A sensation. The 901 put even more & better goodies into the same form factor and can still be had for around £230.
Now HP, Asus & Acer are dropping 9" models and upping the entry to 10". Good for their revenue line but is a dummy whammy for the consumer's pocket (yes I could get my old Asus into my coat pocket!). Road warriors use these for on the hoof browsing, emailing or commanding their remote Unix boxes. Most of which is quite light on the keyboard - the achilles heel of the 9" (and this 10"). Apart from those with defective vision - this brings nothing to the party.
Displacing our preferred party guests is not good news. But it did lead me to buy a Mini 9 while they are still available (Dell uncatalogued them last weekend). Get 9" now while stocks last ..
Acer doesn't seem to get it with these buttons. I have an old Aspire 3680 here and it suffers from the same button problems. You have to press down on them quite firmly and they respond with a "CLICK!". It gets annoying very quickly, which is too bad because the rest of the laptop is well made and even somewhat attractive.
Fo rme a netbook is the most power I can get in a 10" or smaller form factor for £200.
Anything bigger then that or more expensive then that and I consider it a competitor for a real noteobok
As @Martin said 'If a netbook is £329, you start to wonder whether for another fifty quid you could get a decent sized screen and keyboard.'
Still waiting to see what effect if any the next generation of chips makes on the market.
NVidia ION, new integrated chips fronm Intel and new chipsets from AMD.
I also expect the currency exchange rate is playing a big part in pushing up the prices but I still get paid in GBP, so the £200 mark is my netbook max.
I was initially planning on getting the HP Mini 2140, small size and looks good.
Then the EEE 1000HE arrived with insane battery*, better screen res than the HP and I realised I'm not one of those form over substance morons.
Now the EEE 1005HA-M has arrived (in France at least) which is a cross between the 1000HE and the 1008HA seashell thing!
*enough battery to use it on a transatlantic flight sounds good to me... so I don't have to put up with Miss Congeniality 2 or some other tripe.
But sod it, I might not buy one at all and just keep waiting for whatever's round the corner.
Well done Asus, with all this saturation you're missing out on my custom at the moment.
But I do want to wait for Nvidia ION to start appearing in netbooks though.
I've built a new HTPC using a Zotac ION dual-core atom mini-itx board and it's incredible... GPU accelerated 1080p playback all for only 30W power usage and passive cooling!
Price... I'm not too fussed about paying £300 for a netbook.
They were probably making losses on the £150 models, and the EEE7x is less than usable IMO. The £300 netbooks today, easily compare with those incredible £1500+ ultraportables from a few years back... with better battery life!
Yeah you can get the latest and greatest Packard Bell (gah!) from PC World... but I know what I'd rather own
Picked up the D150 6-cell version for my wife at the weekend, and she's thrilled to bits. It's VERY usable, with great battery life (which is important for her), a decent screen and good performance. Yes, you can still get the AA1, but the battery's useless and the SSD versions were awful. As far as she's concerned she's got everything she'd want an ultraportable to do for a LOT less cash. OK, I can see that some peoples' usage is different, but that's kind of the point.
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