Cool Stuffs Review

pros:
nice bright, glossy screen
great keyboard
5800mAH battery welcome bonus vs the 4400mAH advertised
decent price at $350

cons:
noisy fan comes on intermittently after a while
bad trackpad and buttons
comes with ALOT of bloatware that I had to uninstall
0.3MP webcam vs 1.3MP found on most competitors

review:
You get very good specs for the price. The glossy screen displays very well. The 5800mAH battery bonus was a pleasant surprise. I had no problems with the keyboard despite it being the same size as the one from Acer's 8.9" model. It's very quiet and responsive.

What did bug me was the noisy fan, which turns on and off every few minutes sometimes. I can't find a pattern to what triggers this. Sometimes I'm just using Firefox and I get this behavior. If you are sensitive to noise like I am, this may be an issue. The trackpad is also a turn-off. Very small; I think the smallest I've seen from the 10" netbooks. It was difficult to use no matter how I configured the sensitivity. Initially, I was having issues with the synaptics sensor software stalling so the pointer turns into an un-movable ball while it's "thinking". Someone in the discussion forum noted turning off virtual scrolling would help, and it did help for me. The right and left buttons are actually a single button on a pivot and are very very hard to press. When I first started this up, the system was using 500MB Ram to run everything. I had to uninstall a bunch of bloatware to make it run at a more manageable 175MB. I checked out the webcam and microphone via Skype. The other party said my video was very choppy, but the voice was fine. This is understandable as the atom processor is very power efficient (it uses about 2.5Watts instead of the typical 30+ Watts on a desktop) but not very powerful. My CPU was running at 75-90% while I was videochatting and the fan was audibly running the whole time. I wonder if this is why Acer chose a 0.3MP webcam over the 1.3MP found in others in the same class. The specs obviously can't handle smooth videochatting as is, so streaming higher video resolutions would be even more problematic.

Overall, I think half the hardware is awesome and half is awful. I can always deal with software issues, but subpar hardware is tough to get over. I can't really complain given the price and the infancy of the netbook market though. It's a solid machine, but don't expect to get rid of your regular desktop or notebook. Get more detail about Acer Aspire One AOD150-1920 10.1-Inch Ruby Red Netbook - 6.5 Hour Battery Life.