Tech Gift Guide

Netbooks as it’s name implies is a ultra portable laptop that you can use to easily browse the web, compose email or chat to friends online. Due to their size they’re easy enough to walk around with and quickly toss aside when you swap to do something else. How cool does that sound? No more having to trek all the way to the study to quickly send an email and miss out on your TV watching. Now combine them!

While this all sounds great you’ve got to carefully balance up what you need from your potential purchase as there are many devices out there each with their pro’s and con’s. Tech Gift Guide have tried out quite a few and would definitely pick the Acer Aspire One A150 due to it’s power, flexibility, excellent keyboard and brilliant screen.

First things first we’ll let you know that it does lack bluetooth which might be a deal breaker for some. But really now, when was the last time that you used it huh? Exactly, yeah just as we thought so this really is not an issue. The things that make or break a netbook are it’s keyboard and screen. Let’s go through these in turn.

The keyboard on the Acer Aspire One A150 is’, quite simply, one of the best we’ve seen on the market. Feedback is great and we were touch typing in about 30 minutes. Acer really put a lot of effort into the keyboard and it shows as the right shift key is nice and large. Perfect for replying to emails or blogging (in fact this review was composed on it while on the train). Do yourself a favour and get on down to a computer store and try out the netbooks on offer. You’ll feel right at home typing on the Acer Aspire One.

Now onto the screen… Most will be in the range of 8.9” to 10.2” and running at a native resolution of 1200×600. While that does sound like an odd number it is indeed widescreen and for most applications there is plenty of screen to go around. It’s crisp and clear and can tilt back quite far. Great for trying to get the perfect viewing angle when using it in strange places. We found the screen to crisp and clear and had no issues using everyday applications on it. The only niggle we have (and everyone has their own opinion on this) is that the display can be, at times, too reflective. If you’ve got a bright light source shining on it it can prove to be difficult to read. No choice on a matte option. But of course it’s a lightweight netbook so go on and move!

The Acer Apsire One comes in various flavours depending on the amount of memory (512MB or 1GB), storage via SSD or HDD and it’s size and then operating system. You’ve got a choice between either Linux or Windows and while we did try out the Linux version we quickly wiped it off in favour of Windows XP. Don’t flame us, it’s a personal choice but for the average user I’d definitely recommend against the Linux version.

While day-to-day tasks were okay in Linpus nothing felt extremely polished. Everything is there from Firefox for browsing to OpenOffice for document editing but the general lack of cohesion definitely let it down. Of course going over to Windows meant that we did lose out on the ultra fast boot time of Linpus which was a bit of a shame.

Now when it comes to value for money we’d suggest getting the Acer Aspire One A150 which comes bundled with a 120GB HDD and 512MB of RAM. You’ll only then need to decide whether it’s Windows or Linux. A personal choice indeed so we’ll leave that one entirely in your hands.

Whatever netbook you chose it really will make the ultimate gift due to their versatility, portability and extreme “I just want to quickly look something up online”ness. The perfect accompaniment to your desktop and wonderful to carry around for when you have time to kill and want to get emails done.