As you may recall, a few months ago I bought myself an Asus Eee. I said at the time that it was great – almost perfect in fact. And I stick by that statement. I bought it just as a toy really, a pure impulse buy; but for a toy it’s been spectacularly useful. Combined with blanket Wi-Fi coverage across the various Uni buildings, a small notebook (“Netbook”, I think the preferred term is) is absolutely ideal for looking something up quickly, or having access to all your lecture slides/past papers/tuition sheets when revising.

I said when I got it that the biggest flaw was the screen. So, when the new wave of netbooks trickled onto the market – almost all of them with larger screens – I was intrigued. The other week, I splurged on an Acer Aspire One. It’s very closely based on the Eee, but with an 8.9″ screen running at 1024×600. It also has a slightly better keyboard, which is useful.

In terms of hardware, this thing is probably better than the Eee. It’s much more usable, which isn’t to say that the Eee was unusable, just that this one is slightly better. The only thing that lets it down is the software. One of the things I really appreciated with my Eee is that everything was really well thought out. For instance, there was a command on one of the menus in the file browser thing to mount network shares from Windows-based machines. That makes it so easy to use the Eee as part of a network, which is probably a vital part of a machine like that.

On the Acer, you get the feeling things were rushed slightly in development. The biggest error that I can see is that an old driver was used for the graphics which meant that dithering didn’t work properly, meaning that fewer colours were displayed. That was really noticeable as banding on gradients, such as on the BBC website I use as my homepage. Or the menu screen that the thing initially boots into… It also doesn’t have an easy way of seeing Windows shares (to use winsock names you have to edit one of the config files. And even then you have to mount the share from the terminal, rather than a nice friendly window). Once I’d mounted my shares – so I could listen to music from my desktop – I discovered that the included media player is the biggest pile of shit ever. So I had to install something else to do the job (incidentally, Amarok is now my new favourite player and I wish I could use it in Windows too). Oh, and while I’m talking about the media player, I should mention that it doesn’t support DivX/Xvid natively. Also, at one point it stopped loading the network manager tool at boot (purely randomly), and I had to run it from terminal if I wanted to connect to a network.

One thing I will say in favour of the software is that the “easy mode” is based on XFCE, which is probably my favourite WM (from my previous brief forays into Linux). I turned easy mode off fairly quickly.

Now, I don’t mind having to do all these hacks to get the system working as I want. Actually I quite enjoy it – I’ve learned much more about Linux by tweaking this than I ever did from using the Eee. But I can just imagine someone non-techy getting one and having all these issues with it, would make Acer look fairly daft I think. Which is a shame, because it really is a good device – the screen is absolutely stunning (now that I’ve updated the graphics driver…). A worthwhile upgrade from the Eee, I think.

I have to say, I really love devices like this. It just makes sense to have a small, light device that boots up quickly (about 20 seconds) and can do simple things like get online, or quickly edit a document. Actually I’d happily work all day on the Acer, the keyboard/screen are that good. I can imagine that for schools, it’s be really great to give kids one each instead of textbooks and whatever, and throw a wireless network across all the school. They’d be able to access all their books at once then, as well as get online to get other info. Of course, it’s completely unrealistic to do that, but even so.

Anyway, it makes me wonder why someone didn’t come up with the idea sooner. It’s just pure brilliance.

/waffle