The Acer Aspire One 522 (model BZ897) is a good, classic netbook with a very reasonable price ($330 as of March 18, 2011). Petite and slim, with a handsome 10.1-inch widescreen LED-backlit display, a 250GB hard drive, an integrated 1.3-megapixel Webcam, and a multitouch touchpad, this portable does a solid job with multimedia and boasts pretty good battery life--nearly 7 hours on the provided six-cell battery, in our tests.
If you're looking for anything approaching ultraportable-class computing power, though, don't expect to find it here. Outfitted with AMD's new 1GHz Fusion C50 dual-core CPU, 1GB of DDR3 1066 MHz RAM (of which 256MB is reserved for the integrated Radeon HD 6250 graphics), and Windows 7 Starter Edition, the Aspire One 522 turned in a puny mark of 32 on our WorldBench 6 test suite, slightly worse than the scores that some Intel Atom-powered competitors have managed and well below the level of most dual-core notebooks. (You might get more oomph by upgrading the memory to the supported 2GB of RAM.) Gaming scores were poor, too, even for a netbook.
Still, while I wouldn't want to run large spreadsheets or edit video on the Aspire One 522, it's certainly adequate for watching Web video or making a video call. The 1280-by-768 display is exceptionally bright and crisp, the audio is fairly robust for a netbook, and the Webcam captures okay video. In a Skype call I made to family members in China, the Aspire One dropped some frames here and there, but otherwise call quality was fine. I also enjoyed watching a bunch of YouTube music videos on the machine.
If you're looking for anything approaching ultraportable-class computing power, though, don't expect to find it here. Outfitted with AMD's new 1GHz Fusion C50 dual-core CPU, 1GB of DDR3 1066 MHz RAM (of which 256MB is reserved for the integrated Radeon HD 6250 graphics), and Windows 7 Starter Edition, the Aspire One 522 turned in a puny mark of 32 on our WorldBench 6 test suite, slightly worse than the scores that some Intel Atom-powered competitors have managed and well below the level of most dual-core notebooks. (You might get more oomph by upgrading the memory to the supported 2GB of RAM.) Gaming scores were poor, too, even for a netbook.
Still, while I wouldn't want to run large spreadsheets or edit video on the Aspire One 522, it's certainly adequate for watching Web video or making a video call. The 1280-by-768 display is exceptionally bright and crisp, the audio is fairly robust for a netbook, and the Webcam captures okay video. In a Skype call I made to family members in China, the Aspire One dropped some frames here and there, but otherwise call quality was fine. I also enjoyed watching a bunch of YouTube music videos on the machine.
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