The only part of the AA1's exterior that we have doubts about are the touchpad and buttons. The buttons are placed on either side of the touchpad, which is all well and good from a space-saving point of view, but in everyday use we much prefer the more traditional placement below the pad - the place where you fingers' muscle memory expects them to be. The buttons are too small too.
Exterior connections consist of three USB ports; 3.5mm headphone and microphone jacks; a VGA port; a 10/100Mb/s Ethernet port; and an SD slot. So far, so Eee. But the AA1 has a second memory card slot, and this is used in a very novel way.
The screen's superb - but the trackpad's not
More on this later - continuing our tour around the AA1, flip up the lid and you come across a 8.9in, 1024 x 600, 262,000-colour, LED-backlit screen, and a rather decent example of the breed it is too. Bright, clear and well up to the task of watching full-screen movies if your AA1 will be doing duty as a PMP.
Above the screen sits a 0.3-megapixel web cam and a digital microphone. Combine these with the two reasonable stereo speakers and you have an effective little communications device.
Under the hood, the AA1 is driven by Intel's 1.6GHz Atom N270, just like the Eee 901 and 1000, and the MSI Wind. It has 512MB of memory and a Intel 945GSE chipset which also provides the graphics. OK, not a spec to blow anyone's socks off, but good enough to cope with anything that should realistically be thrown at a netbook.
Regcast training : Hyper-V 3.0, VM high availability and disaster recovery
COMMENTS
Re: A few points
"-- The HP 2133 has this thing beaten on all fronts, even comes with a 'standard' Linux: SuSE."
Yeah, except for the fact the 2133 is slow as hell, runs as hot as hell and has a similar battery life! Check your facts before posting please.
Integrated storage slot
@ W
The integrated storage SD slot (accepts SDHC) is used by the file system as it gets mounted into your home directory, which is itself in the /mnt directory. It's a *nix thing that M$ pinched in Win 2000 btw.
I bought the 150 L last week and I'm using it for nearly everything although you will definitely want to change the default twit-proof interface to something more flexible - acerguy will tell you how.
The 120GB holds my MP3 collection (60gb) and still has space for a few movies for the kids although you really want a power socket for movies.
For the record, everyone who has seen this has asked if it is a "real" pc, they are quite surprised when I tell them that it is.
Will buy an aftermarket battery when they come down in price, unless I can source some good quality li-ion cells and build one myself.
Run on alkalines, not very green is it! Now a solar case lid, that would be funky.
J.
On sale at PC WOrld for £199
Just to let you know that PC World are now selling them at £199. If you can pick up the bigger battery, flog the old one, then it's not that bad a price. Linky here: http://www.pcworld.co.uk/martprd/product/seo/705895#productInformationSection
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