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. | | ACER ASPIRE ONE | ASUS EEE PC 1000H | Comments |
. | Overall build quality | Great | Excellent | One's right wristpad area sinks in and clicks, other tight and solid all-around. Apparently not errata-- others have reported their right wristpads doing the same. |
. | General feel in hand
| Excellent | Good | The EEE PC doesn't provide total confidence you can shut down and run witth it without possibly twinging a wrist muscle / tendon as there's moderately more rear-end heft vs. the One. According to http://unitstep.net/blog/2008/08/26/acer-aspire-one-6-cell-vs-3-cell-battery-comparison/, the 6-cell on the One doesn't feel much heavier than the 3-cell. Also the One's physical dimensions makes it feel far more svelte in smaller hands vs. EEE PC. |
. | Display -> Size | Good | Excellent | When viewing text, the EEE PC's 10.2" screen immediately feels more expansive than the One's 8.9" screen. When text is too small, however, somehow the dot-pitch on the EEE PC renders text with jagged edges. Maybe there's some setting I need to tweak that I don't know about, other than font-smoothing which is set identically on both machines. |
. | Display -> Picture Quality | Excellent | Good | 9/14/2008: Updated to signify both have LED backlighting The One's hues seem more vivid and consistent, and the color contrast better, vs. the 1000H's. Meanwhile, EEE PC still has a blue push that seems hard to adjust, even after modifying blue satuation values in XP's Display Properties. |
. | Display -> Coating | OK -> Good | Excellent | I've always been a fan of matte screens. The One's screen is the first notebook I've ever had with the glossy overlay, and it gives me headaches when I'm in a room equipped with a lot of fluorescent lighting. ot sure about other types of lighting. With lower ambient lighting, it's a treat to use. I'll see if a matte screen overlay / protector helps the One. |
. | Display -> Fatigue | OK | OK | The One's display is potentially fatiguing due to its small size and glossiness. The EEE PC is potentially fatiguing because of of the weaker visuals. |
. | Sound | There is sound | OK | Both feature weak volume projection vs. my Macbook Pro. The EEE PC's volume is louder than the One's, and the One's tone quality is tinnier-- "whinier", as a commenter pointed out. The EEE PC's Dolby surround-sound emulation shenanigan that doesn't work as well as more mature products 10 years older. |
. | Keyboard Size | Good | Excellent | Being 6'3" and having bear paws, the oh-so-slightly larger keyboard on the EEE PC allows my fingers to space themselves out more natually than the One's. |
. | Keyboard Feel | Excellent | Good | Even with less travel and smaller keys, the tighter keypress on the One feels significantly better than the wobblier EEE PC's keys. The EEE PC's key-tops do tend to bend while depressing while the One's keys are firm all throughout its travel. Also, even despite a smaller backspace key on the One, the One slightly excels with an overall better keyboard layout, vs. the EEE PC's with its awkward right-shift key placement. One thing to note is that if you type hard, you can see (but can't really feel) the One's keyboard flexing, whereas the EEE PC's keyboard base is solid. Even with the One's keyboard flexing, it actually doesn't feel like a poorer-quality keyboard. It's all visceral. Surprisingly, my type-speed is noticeably faster on the One vs. EEE PC. |
. | Touchpad | Excellent | OK-> Good | Kudos to the One's painted, semi-gloss touchpad, which allows very consistent and predictable cursor movements with fingers both dry and moist. The EEE PC's rough-and-dry-feeling touchpad lends to some unpredictable actions with drier fingers (as mine tend to be). Maybe after prolonged use the EEE PC's touchpad will smoothen out for easier gliding. The EEE PC's touchpad experience feels twitchery, more agitating, and often seems to have a mind of its own with unpredictable sensitivity. With moist / wet fingers, however, the EEE PC's touchpad is better. The EEE PC's multi-touch features are a good value add, though. If available, however, I'd prefer using my external portable mouse over either machine's input device. |
. | Touchpad mouse buttons | Good | Not-So-Good | If you can bench 25 pounds on each thumb and forefinger, congrats, the EEE PC's mouse buttons were built with you in mind. Also, strangely, the best position to press the touchpad buttons for my thumb was either right on the hard edge where the button's two angles meet, or the angled surface on the same plane as the 4 status LED's below the right wristpad. Pressing these surfaces of the buttons expends less effort; the flat upper surface of the mouse buttons on the same plane as the touchpad are just a chore to depress. The One's odd placement of the left or right buttons are just that, odd; but with two-handed use, it doesn't take too long to adapt. |
. | Overall input-device experience | Great | Good | Even with being conscious of keeping my wrists / palms away from the EEE PC's touchpad area, somehow I'm still executing phantom program launches, undo's, and random fat-fingering which, in my 16 years of computing experience, and being unable to determine why is downright aggravating and baffling. The larger keys and multitouch gestures do help the EEE PC's grade. |
. | Features | Good | Excellent | Not considering the factory hard drive and RAM specs, the EE PC's BT, expandability, and higher webcam resolution, configurable hardware hotkeys, dynamic CPU clock adjustment, 2x larger battery, screen scrolling for irregular display resolutions, and a richer suite of factory utilites make the EEE PC a value standout. The only advantage the One has is the two card readers, one of them reading a wide variety of card formats, while the other can somehow merge whatever card's in it with the primary storage on the machine into a single partition, according to web reports (this was for Linux editions, not sure about XP). |
. | Expandability | Not-so-good | Excellent | The One's expandability restrictions will make you think twice before attempting open-heart surgery on it, but WinXP's excessive memory consumption will have you ever wondering if you should just take the chance and open her up. The EEE PC's RAM and hard drives can be accessed and swapped in less than 5 minutes with a standard-issue micro-screwdriver.
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. | Accessories | Good | A bit better | While both come with some sort of casing, the EEE PC's is actually zippered and has a felt-velour (although a very cheap-feeling velour) texture on the outside. I had the One for a few days when the EEE PC arrived, and at first, I thought the EEE PC's case was superior to the One's, because the One's case is open-ended on one end, with exposed corners at the other end of the pleather, form-fitting case. The EEE PC's case is rather tight width-wise but strangely has some spare room depth-wise, which is quite odd. Also, the EEE PC's case isn't lined well around the zipper, so taking the EEE PC in and out of the case frequently may result in the zipper rubbing or chipping the EEE over long-term-- YMMV. Therefore, the EEE PC's case quality didn't blow the One's case out of the water here. In fact, strangely, the One's case now seems more "elegant" than the EEE PC's in some sense: better-fitted, better-textured pleather, and thinner. But the EEE PC comes with a screen-cleaning cloth which the One lacks. Lastly, although both machine's power bricks are *tiny* compared to those of standard notebooks, the EEE PC's excels in a few ways: there's an LED on the brick itself indicating if it's plugged in, the brick itself is *slightly* smaller than the One's, plus the AC portion of the power cable is nominally thinner than the One's thick, rope-like AC cable. |
. | Fan Noise | Good | Good | When running both machines with the comparable CPU and memory load (50-75% CPU, ~800MB RAM usage) the One's fan is generally very quiet while "idle" but dials up signifcantly every so often. The EEE PC's "idle" noise is generally louder than the One's but doesn't dial itself up as significantly as the One's. |
. | Hard Drive Noise | Excellent (Quieter) | Good | You can hear the needle of the EEE PC HDD much more distinctly because, well, the hard drive is basically right behind the sheer, plastic access panel which you can remove in less than a minute from the underside of the machine-- and the copious venting around it help project the noise. I don't know where the One's hard drive is, but it's probably better encased inside, making it quieter. |
. | Hard Drive Capacity | Great | Good | I find it hard to imagine how anyone would legitimately consume all 80 GB on the EEE PC let alone the 120GB on the One. However, the factory default having two separate 40 GB partitions on the EEE PC seems an interesting choice. |