14 DAY TRIAL // You'd have thought that companies wouldn't be making them anymore, but people have been wrong about things before and they would be wrong in assuming this.
PC makers have not, in fact, stopped making netbooks. Shipments aren't at the level of last year or two years ago, but entry-level laptops are still alive and breathing.
We admit that, here, we consider the new Acer product to offer us a particular incentive: it uses an AMD processor.
For some reason, AMD's accelerated processing units (APUs) just haven't scored enough design wins to actually give Intel chips a hard time when it comes to media coverage.
Thus, we feel slightly obligated to keep an eye out for those occasions when APUs do get used in laptops, like now, or when Acer revealed the Brazos 2.0-powered Aspire E1-421.
Here, we are looking at the Aspire One 725, with a display size of 11.6 inches and a dual-core C-60 Ontario chip (1-1.3 GHz) with integrated Radeon HD 6290 graphics.
The “CineCrystal” panel has a resolution of 1,366 x 768 pixels (HD) and a brightness of 200 nits, which isn't bad at all for the size.
And now we may as well list the other components, starting with the 4 GB of RAM (random access memory) backing the APU up.
Storage space is provided by a hard disk drive (HDD), whose capacity can be of 320 GB or 500 GB, depending on customer preference.
Needless to say, all the necessary I/O ports and plugs are present as well (USB, HDMI, a CrystalEye webcam, etc.), plus wired and wireless connectivity (Bluetooth 4.0, Wi-Fi and an optional HSPA modem with 850/900/1900/2100 MHz 3G support).
All the hardware runs on the energy held by a 4-cell battery, but the charge life of that battery was not mentioned. Neither were the price and the availability date for that matter.