Acer Aspire 1410 netbook

Signaling the new trend of thin and light notebooks is the Acer Aspire 1410. Not only does it run on a low-voltage processor offering good performance, but it has a slim-trim 11.6-inch form factor similar to the Acer Aspire AO751h. But the Aspire 1410 gives better overall performance than any netbook we’ve seen so far, without compromising on thin design and light weight.

Not counting the Olympics logo on its screen lid, the Aspire 1410 looks almost identical to the Aspire AO751h. The screen lid is glossy silver that flows over to the palm-rest with a brushed metal finish. The two-toned silver-on-black color scheme helps the Aspire 1410 look decent and elegant. With its screen lid closed, the Aspire 1410 is marginally thinner than the Aspire AO751h netbook, and weighs the same at 1.38-kg with a six-cell battery. The notebook is very well built and doesn’t feel cheap in any way.

Its 11.6-inch LED-backlit screen is glossy in nature and supports a maximum screen resolution of 1366×768 pixels. Screen is nice and bright, offers good viewing angles, and displays crisp, clear text. The compact screen does a good job while watching movies, too. Despite its netbook form factor, the Aspire 1410’s isolated, chiclet-styled keyboard is well laid out and has nice full-sized keys that are comfortable to type on. The palm-rest is obviously small, and so is the touchpad; but it comes with multi-gesture support (pinch for zoom, flick to turn pages, etc.) and is quite responsive. Its separate mouse buttons provide good tactile feedback.

The Aspire 1410 runs on a low-voltage Intel Celeron SU2300 1.2-GHz dual-core processor. Don’t let its low voltage and slower clock speed fool you, for it performs admirably well when paired with 2GB of DDR2 RAM. It has a 250GB hard drive, and comes with onboard Intel GMA 5500 graphics. Three USB ports, multi-card reader, audio jacks, and a VGA-out port is pretty much standard, but it also deploys faster connectivity standards like Gigabit Ethernet, Draft-N Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth 2.1. The Aspire 1410 also comes with an HDMI port (seen in the MSI Wind12 U210 netbook) and bundles in 64-bit Windows 7 Home Premium. The only thing it doesn’t have is an optical drive, an obvious trade-off for enhanced ultra-portability.

For an entry level thin and light notebook, the Aspire 1410 performed very well. In terms of synthetic benchmarks, it outperformed the MSI Wind12 U210 and HP Pavilion dv2 by over 20 per cent in PC Mark 05. With a 3D Mark 06 score of 538 (better than any netbook platform in the market right now), the Aspire 1410 played 720p HD videos without a hitch, stuttering a few times while handling 1080p files. We had no trouble browsing the Web, working on productivity sheets, and listening to music – all at the same time – something you could never hope to do on a netbook without slowing it down. And the Aspire 1410 did this respectably on Windows 7, not on the older, less resource-hungry Windows XP that netbooks deploy. Its six-cell battery lasted a respectable two hours and 20 minutes in BatteryEater on high performance preset. Not as good as some of the better netbooks, but expect close to five hours of real-world time on a single charge.Bottom Line

The Aspire 1410 is clearly better than any netbook we’ve reviewed in terms of pure performance. It is meant for people interested in a compact, thin and light laptop that offers impressive ultra-portability without huge performance bottlenecks. Compared to a netbook, its price of US$687 may seem high, but it isn’t considering the Aspire 1410’s feature set and performance benefits.

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Jim Love, Chief Content Officer, IT World Canada

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