The Acer One hits Europe in three flavors, reports Fudzilla‘s Lars-Göran Nilsson, with up to 1GB of RAM, 8GB of flash or a 120GB hard drive, Linpus Linux or Windows XP, and a $500-ish price tag. Acer’s entry in the “cheap subnote” trend, it goes tab key-to-tab key with the likes of Asus’s Eee, MSI’s Wind, HP’s Mininote, and a forthcoming Dell that will easily win if it’s less than $300, as rumored.
You can buy it at T-Mobile’s German online store for €330.
Acer Aspire One A110L available imminently [Fudzilla via Engadget]
Why do all those subnotebooks have huge bezels with respect to the screen size ? I mean, with a screen so small, I’d expect them to try to use all the millimeters they can grab for screen real-estate.
The reason they have large bezels is that they are cheap.
To keep the costs down, the LCD panels have to be quite small and reducing the laptop down to the size of the LCD panel would make the keyboard too small.
Fujitsu has some very well designed laptops — their LifeBook series. With their finances, they could easily break away from the herd and strike out on their own, as Apple has done with OSX, if they would formally team up with a Linux distribution such as Ubuntu (Canonical) and actively underwrite the software development to assure that all software drivers work flawlessly on Fujitsu Lifebooks (just as Apple integrates OSX with their hardware). Not only software drivers, but also financially supporting the developers for Free Software projects that make Ubuntu Linux a genuine usable alternative to OSX (let alone Windows).
For “must have” applications such as MS Office / Outlook, check out Ubuntu’s seemless virtualization using Qemu. Better than Boot Camp; as if Parallels with Coherence mode were built-in to OSX for free.
On the T-Mobile shop: ‘versandfertig in 2 Wochen’ – 2 weeks wait before it’s shipped.
I’m also hoping the Dell E doesn’t disappoint.
The “E Video +” is what I’ve got my eye on.
The screen to Bezel ratios were often interesting in rugged – Itronics or Toughbook gear. IIRC one toughbook had literally enough screen bezel area to allow calling cards as framing stick ons. It may have been 2 vertical cards each side of the bezel and 3 horizontal at the base. With the added utility of the HD etc lights being in the handle/touchpad frame area. What makes or breaks subnotes to me is fragility then all else.
I won’t miss the optical drive, but I really want a 10-digit keypad.
Maybe a slide-out?
Brando USB keypad and hub
I think it’s because LCD lamps can’t be miniaturized beyond a certain point. LED backlighting can be, however, but the engineering is a bitch.
Fujitsu has licked it, and has super-thin bezels on its latest subnotebooks. I expect the next generation of MacBook Air will as well.
But for these cheapo subnotes, no chance.