The Acer Aspire One, Sure To Inspire You

I had been contemplating getting a Netbook, for some time before I actually did a search on Newegg for them. I figured they would be astronomically priced since they were new and just catching on. What I found surprised me in a good way. I could get a Netbook for under 400 dollars!
The choices in this price ranger included the MSI Wind, Acer Aspire One, and the Asus EEE. The Acer Aspire One Caught my eye right off with it's 299 price. I did some research and the Aspire One actually got decent reviews so I thought I would bite the bullet and order one.
Now a little back story for you all to explain some choices of mine. I had an old Dell Inspiron 8200 for many years (since 2001) and for the most part it was a decent laptop, except for the hard drive. I had replaced 3 hard drives in that laptop before finally selling it. This experience leaves me with a bit of a bad taste in my mouth when it comes to laptop hard drives and their durability. Since I never actually brought my old Dell anywhere and it had all those troubles I thought what will happen when I actually start traveling with my Netbook. This all lead me to choose the Solid State Drive for my Netbook.
Now I know most people out their cringe when they hear the amount of storage you can put on an SSD drive, but for me 16gb is plenty on a machine that will only be checking email and blogging. I have a beefy desktop PC for gaming and music, so I don't need all of the extra space. This actually leads me to the first feature that I love about the AAO, the SD expansion slot on the side. That's right all you have to do is slide in an SD card in the expansion slot and the Aspire One automatically combines it with your SSD. You don't even have to mess with drive letters or anything like that, just simple on the fly expansion.
Some other features include 3 USB 2.0 ports, another SD card slot, and video out . It also comes with some standard stuff like wireless, ethernet port, headphone and mic inputs, and even a webcam. The webcam is actually really decent I might add, and has great low light picture for only being 0.3mp. Again all of these features arn't really mind blowing, but lets remember the price and size of this thing...299 and the size of a hard cover book!
Since I was going with the SSD version I was thinking about speed, and of course that meant Linux as well. It comes with a flavor based off Fedora Core 7 called Linpus Lite. It's very icon driven and all about easy access to the things you use often and hiding the things you don't. Again this is fine for a casual user, don't worry you advanced users there is a way to get to all the other stuff as well. I have not actually timed the boot, but I would say its around 20 secs. This is great because when you are on the train or waiting at the airport between flights you don't want to spend a lot of your free time booting your laptop.
Now lastly a few drawbacks if I had to pick them. First off battery life. I get about 2 hours 30 mins on this 3 cell battery. There is a 6 cell model available, but it sticks out of the back to much for me. The battery life can also be reasoned away when you stop and think how long you actually need to check your email or chat with friends. If you want to use Skype for hours, just plug it into the wall. The keyboard is a little to small for me. I have small fingers, so I can imagine others having problems with it. At this point I have gotten used to the keyboard, but if you are writing anything of length it can get old quick. The last thing I will mention also has to do with typing, it's the damn touchpad. I'll be typing along and all the sudden brush the touchpad and next thing I know I'm typing up in the middle of some other paragraph. Again maybe I need to get used to this a bit more, but it can get frustrating.
I would have to say this Netbook is up in the top 5 best purchases I have made right along side my Garmin Nuvi. If you are looking for something cheap to do simple tasks online with, then look no further the Acer Aspire One delivers.