PERFECT COMPANION ON THE MOVE

Raaj Dayal, November 23, 2008
The Financial Express

Nobody has been able to answer the riddle whether it was the chicken that came first or the egg but I have certainly entertained the egg first in this column. In case you are wondering if I am going to hold forth on my culinary skills, let me assure that that’s not the case. The egg I talked about first was the portable DVD writer and the chicken here is a tiny, little, chicken-size notebook.

In my previous column, I had mentioned a notebook that is so small and lightweight that it can easily fit into a lady’s handbag. This is Acer’s new ultra portable, featherweight netbook (as they spell it) ‘Aspire One’. Weighing less than a premature baby at under a kilogram, this netbook occupies mere 6.7 x 9.8 x 1.1 inches in real estate.

Resembling a handbook in size and shape, Aspire One has a very glossy, mirror-like mid-night blue top (comes in other colours too). The glass-like finish spreads up to the display screen and the bezel around it. I didn’t like the glass finish spreading over the screen as it catches reflections of your face and shiny objects behind you in bright light.

An almost full size keyboard (84 keys) occupies most of the main body of the netbook leaving very little space for the touch pad and the left and right click buttons, leave alone the palm-rest. The keypad is well laid out and I loved the tactical feedback of the keys. However, the mouse click buttons are so tiny that you will require a long time to get used to them. On the top of the display screen is an inbuilt microphone and a 1.3 mega pixel camera. The 8.9 inch, CrystalBrite WSVGA LED backlit display screen has a rather uncommon resolution of 1024 X 600 and supports 262K of high fidelity colours. CrystelBrite display technology prevents the ambient light from diffusing the internal light and thus helps reproduce sharp, distortion-free images with vibrant, life-like colours even outdoors.