Refurbished Acer Aspire One AOA 110-1722 Netbook Review

Getting Connected

Connecting to Wi-Fi access points is pretty straightforward. There is an icon in the taskbar for this and clicking on it reveals the hotspots in the area. Select the one you want, enter the passcode if needed, and you’re good to go. I did find that I sometimes had to enter the passcode twice for my home network though. Basic configurations can be done through the settings menu as well, like determining your power preferences and so on. If you have troubles with WiFi, Ethernet is also an option.

The Casual User Experience

If you’re hoping to do any heavy-duty lifting with this netbook, you’ll be sorely disappointed. It was never meant to be a primary computer and you should not expect it to perform as such. In our subjective tests (because we can’t use our usual sweet of Windows benchmarks) it seems to handle YouTube videos without too much trouble, but you really shouldn’t be running too many tabs in FireFox while surfing the Internet. The 512MB of RAM is pretty anemic. The 1024×600 resolution display can handle most webpages, but anything with too much vertical height (like Google Reader) can present some frustration.

One situation that ended up being quite frustrating was my attempt to use TweetDeck, my preferred Twitter desktop client, on the Aspire One. TweetDeck is powered by Adobe AIR and the Adobe website had a version of AIR for Linux. I thought I was in luck. Well, first it wouldn’t let me execute the .bin installation file (I later learned to chmod +x it). When I did get it to run, it asked for the root password. This was never given to me and it was only after some searching online that I found how to reset it. After all of that, AIR still wouldn’t install, because it said the administrator “may” have disallowed it. In the end, I gave up and went with TwittterFox instead.

Battery Life

The expected battery life on the Acer Aspire One will vary considerably based on a number of factors. Where have you set the screen brightness? Are you using the webcam and microphone? Do you have any peripherals plugged into the USB port? Are you reading text files or watching a series of intensive videos?

That said, I found that with moderate Internet surfing duties (no other applications running, no more than 3 tabs at a time) and with Wi-Fi on continuously, I was able to get about two to three hours on the 3-cell 2200mAh rechargeable battery. My average, over the course of a couple of days, was in the 2:15 to 2:30 range. Not surprisingly, this dipped when I was playing games, watching YouTube videos, and doing other things that draw more battery.

Final Thoughts and Conclusion

Yes, it is possible that netbooks could already be obsolete, but one of the reasons why I proposed that notion was the issue of price. At $400 to $500, many netbooks don’t offer as much in terms of a value proposition, but at just $250, the refurbished Acer Aspire One is very affordable and gives great bang for the buck. It’s the same price as an iPod touch and it offers a truer Internet browsing experience.

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There are certainly some quirks to this netbook, like the strange design of the trackpad and the use of Linpus Linux, but it has its advantages as well. The keyboard, while not being the highest of quality, offers good travel and a terrific layout. It’s a reasonable size and it didn’t take long at all to get used to typing on it. Surfing the net using the pre-installed Mozilla FireFox was fine, so long as I didn’t try to push its limits. I could not, for example, get UStream.tv to work properly for me. I could view but not broadcast.

At just over two hours of life, I found the Aspire One to be a little inadequate in this respect. If you can hook up to a wall outlet, you should. There are larger batteries available for the Aspire One, but these can run over $100 each. By picking one of these up, you are nearly nullifying the savings you are getting over a more expensive alternative. If the $249 refurb’d Acer came with a 6-cell battery, I’d be happier, even if I sacrificed a little in weight and portability. Geeks.com always has special sales so it might be worth it to drop by on occasion to see if that refurbished configuration miraculously becomes available.

No, the Acer Aspire One AOA 110-1722 is not as powerful or robust as something like the Sony VAIO P or HP Mini 1000, but it’s not nearly as pricey either. You’re not sacrificing too much, because the main reason for a netbook is to surf the “real” web in a laptop-like fashion and the el cheapo Aspire One can do that.

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