Saturday’s Apple: What’s With These Netbooks?

Starting with Asus and the eeePC, more and more companies have jumped on the bandwagon with what’s become labeled as netbooks. These are usually really small notebooks, about 1kg or less, 9 or 10-inch screens, relatively low power and performance processors, low cost, etc. They’re the very symbol of compromise in many ways but they are meant to be mobile, temporary workstations for those who live in “the cloud”.

Another trend which feeds into the netbook craze is that of “the cloud”. Even Apple is now living in the cloud with their MobileMe service. The cloud basically means the internet and the idea is that we put more and more information online and we run web applications rather than applications on our desktops, in our regular OS, like Windows or Mac OS X. Google’s recently announced Chrome web browser is another good example of the cloud since it’s arguably aimed at users who spend most of their time using online applications and putting their information online.

And I think the cloud developments are good to an extent, at least for some users. In what I do I live a lot in the cloud. I use a lot of web services and put a lot of information online. On a daily basis I use all the systems from 37 Signals a lot, I live in GMail, my to-do list is with Remember The Milk, I use Box.net and Amazon S3 for file storage and backup, I use many WordPress and vBulletin sites, and more. Sure it’s a problem when I don’t have internet access, but largely it’s not that much of an issue. And with smaller computers, Wi-Fi in a lot of places and 3G access in between, being online from anywhere is almost a reality today.

Apple’s offering in this arena are MacBook Air, iPhone, and iPod Touch. Personally I don’t think the iPhone and iPod Touch are really valid options for most users, but the MacBook Air surely is. And it’s a really thin and light computer and it obviously run Mac OS X. And that’s the downfall of all the other netbooks, I think, that they run Windows or Linux. I’ve said this many times before, if Apple brought out a smaller-sized tablet or netbook, I’d be one of the first in line to get it. Even though the MacBook Air is a great computer and the design and concept is amazing, let’s face it, it falls short in some areas.

I’ve spent some time lately with an Acer Aspire One, a netbook running a 1.6GHz processor with 1GB RAM and 120GB hard drive and Windows XP. The screen is 8.9 inches at 1024×600 pixels and it has Wi-Fi (802.11b/g), Ethernet port, flash card reader, three USB ports, and monitor port. And this is all accomplished in a package right around 1kg and less than a quarter of the price of MacBook Air.

And let’s be honest about it, when I first opened it up it struck me as being typical PC. Ports everywhere, stickers, and all that we’ve come to know from PC manufacturers. But it is also very light, the keyboard is even with my fingers pretty easy to type on. One thing that is not great is the trackpad, which is very small, and they mouse keys are situated on either side of it, which takes some getting used to. And as long as you don’t turn it over it doesn’t look too bad, at least as far as a PC goes. I got the dark-blue version, which I felt looked better than the white one. Those were the only two colors offered when I bought it.

So is the Acer a good computer for “the cloud”? Yes it is, in fact it’s a great choice. One of the first things I installed was Google Chrome and now that’s pretty much all I run on it. I did download and install OpenOffice.org for the occasional times I need to crete or read Office documents, but to be honest I can do that with Google Docs too. Really, I doubt I will ever fill up the hard drive, but it’s good to have the space available if I should need it. With the memory card reader, the hard drive will probably serve as backup for photos and videos on shorter trips. And I downloaded JungleDisk so it’s automatically and regularly backed up.

The Acer certainly won’t replace my MacBook Pro as my main notebook computer or my Mac Pro as the desktop that I work at most all day long. But it will be a good complement to the Macs, at least until Apple comes out with something smaller or cooler. And who knows they just might.

Look out for some further notes on the experience with the Acer in the future. For now, I’ve included some photos here and there’s a brief video too.

As a sidenote, the first Aspire One I brought home from the store was apparently a lemon. When starting up it just said it couldn’t find a boot volume. So back to the store it went and to Sharaf DG’s credit they gave me a new one rather quickly. And that one started up just fine. When the guy at the store wrote up the slip on the returned netbook he wrote something like “commonly known defect” so it might be a common problem with hard drives in these machines. It’s a Toshiba drive, one of those small ones that’s used in iPods, I suspect.

Popularity: 2% [?]