Acer Aspire One D150 review

After spending a significant amount of time with Acer’s 10-inch Aspire One D150, here now is my full review of the said netbook. The Acer Aspire One, with its 9=inch screen, served me well all these months of owning it, but the AAO D150 turned out to be a worthy contender, not only to Acer’s other notebooks but the notebooks of its competitors, as well. Hit the break for the full review.

Impressions on Hardware

My reaction upon picking it up for the first time is that it is one “heavy” netbook. Though the fact that my review unit had a 6-cell battery on and a larger screen at 10-inches compared to my 9-inch AAO, I think the biggest reason why it has become somewhat heavier than I expected is Acer’s use of brushed metal on the body. Still, it’s not that hard to carry around, and in a man-purse, it should fit snugly into place.

The Acer Aspire D150′s box contains just the necessary papers (quick guide, warranty card, etc), AC adaptor and the netbook itself. The only thing missing from it is a leather pouch just like the one that came with the 9-inch version when it was released.

I’d say it’s a pretty well built netbook, with a great design to boot. Only problem is, it fails in some areas in terms of quality.

Keyboard, trackpad and connectivity

The power button is placed on the right side, just above the keyboard, while opposite to it is the Bluetooth on/off button and Caps Lock/Num Lock light indicators.

The keyboard Acer used on this model still has the same set of plasticky buttons that feel like they’re going to fall off any minute if you ever do any long haul typing. I enjoyed using the keyboard for the slight increase in size (nearing full size), but I’ve found that typing for long periods of time on it can cause some fingers to hurt a bit. And that’s not a good thing. However, for just typing the occasional Notepad notes and blog posts, I felt the keyboard sufficed. Also, it’s nothing a USB/wireless keyboard can’t fix.

As for the trackpad, Acer did the right thing in ditching the old, side-contained left and right click buttons in favor of a single left/right button positioned directly underneath the touch pad. Unfortunately, it’s a little too narrow to provide any real comfort while pressing and oftentimes it can be hard to even just press it at all. Meanwhile, clicking with the use of the touchpad can be equally hard, because it’s not as responsive as it ought to be. Still, this isn’t that big of a niggle since it can easily be solved by using a USB/wireless mouse. I couldn’t get myself to use the multi-touch functionality so I found it pretty useless.

When it comes to connectivity, the Acer Aspire One D150 has got it all–as far as a netbook goes. It quickly runs out of USB ports (as there are only three), and besides the power jack, it’s got a VGA-out port, audio in/out ports, multi-in-1 card reader, Ethernet jack and a security lock slot on its sides.

There’s built-in Bluetooth, but I only got it to work for a file transfer with my Nokia phone, and failed to do so with another Bluetooth-enabled notebook of mine. There’s no built-in 3G module here, but you can always attach one via a free USB port and the Wi-Fi picks up signals very well.

Using Windows XP

Booting up to Windows XP felt like it took longer than necessary. I reckon it’s probably because of the obligatory “bloatware” that comes pre-installed with it in the form of an antivirus program, Acer-made utilities, and Google Desktop. After waiting for a good 30-45 seconds to get from blank screen to the Desktop, you will be greeted with pop-ups like it’s 2005 on the Internet, telling you to update this, download that, check out this, which, needless to say, got really annoying. I doubt if the average computer user will even do anything other than click the visible “x” marks to close these pop-ups, so they will be pestered with these annoying things until the day they learn to turn them off.

But you can’t blame Acer for subjecting their customers to this kind of annoyance. I guess it’s obligatory stuff to have on machines that come pre-installed with Windows XP Home. After all, it enables them to customize the netbook to their liking to the extent that they think will benefit its users.

That said, I think the performance of this netbook with Windows XP Home Edition is just a little bit over the average level. Its 1GB of RAM and 1.6GHz Atom processor with GMA950 graphics aren’t exactly the best combination for an XP machine, but for light tasks which a typical netbook user would be doing, it is fairly adequate. Every once in a while, an intrusive pop-up would come out to disturb the silent peace of operating the Aspire One D150, but it doesn’t really seem to affect how speedy the netbook runs. It’s definitely faster than the SSD-equipped Acer Aspire One that comes with a 9-inch screen, so it would be a nice upgrade for those who own this particular unit.

Battery Life

One of the Acer Aspire One D150′s strong points is its battery life. For through the use of a 6-cell battery, one can run up to 5 hours of usage on a single full charge. I know I have. I even tested the battery life by using the Aspire One D150 for about 1-2 hours each day just for browsing and sideloading of songs to my phone, and I was able to get 6 days of usage. Soon, I believe the battery life on netbooks will be so good that using them will feel like using cellphones all over again–2-3 hours of “heavy” usage per day and you’ll be able to use it for about 3-4 days. One side-effect of the increased battery life, though, is the lengthened charging time. Since the battery is of a higher capacity, it takes longer to fully charge it. Also, it sticks out like a sore thumb at the back of the unit.

Final Thoughts

Compared to the Acer Aspire One with a 9-inch screen, the Aspire One D150 is a worthy upgrade. With a bigger screen, built-in Bluetooth, longer battery life and better design, it beats the old model over most aspects any day. However, I feel that Acer released this model a little too late, for those same features were already found in offerings of its competitors back when the 9-inch model was their only available netbook. For the price, this is still worth it, though, and anyone who still doesn’t have a 10-inch netbook will do good to put this one on their “netbooks to be considered” list.

Acer aspire one D150 is available at Amazon.com for $329.