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By David Rothman

image Want a cheap XP netbook that can read e-books in a bunch of format?

Or at least can do a multiformat act with the right apps on it?

Check out the Acer Aspire One on sale from CompUSA for $199.97 and and shipping. Act quickly if this intrigues you, since the last batch sold out. (Disclosure: We have absolutely no CompUSA connection but may go after an ad from the company since its offerings of are ongoing interest to me and others—just so it doesn’t tell us what to write or not write.) I myself own one. Pros, besides price:

  • The 8.9-inch screen offers 1024×600 res—not spectacular but passable for e-books if you enable the Acer’s ClearType function. The screen is big enough to handle the Washington Post Web site, which, for me, is problematic in both the regular and mobile flavors on my iPod Touch.
  • The keyboard is better than those of typical netbooks, according to some users. It’s far from perfect for me. But this gizmo is more for surfing in my case than for creating, and perhaps I’ll get used to the smaller keys.
  • The USB ports let you attach a conventional keyboard and mouse.
  • The Acer apparently works great with Mobipocket and includes Adobe Reader. My Acer just arrived, and right now I’m almost out of time, so I’ll let this write-up be only a first look. I doubt I’ll have problems installing eReader, Microsoft Reader or FBReader, the latter of which, by the way, can change orientation. Adobe Digital Editions should work fine, too—I’ll update this. I might also try the desktop reader app for my Sony PRS-505.
  • A 120G hard drive and 1G of factory-supplied memory should be of interest. You can store zillions of books and run a variety of desktop e-book apps.
  • The Acer comes with built-in WiFi and a Webcam.

Cons:

  • The refresh rate is only 60hz—at least 10-20 hz worse than typical setups. To make up for this, you may want to read e-books with a somewhat darker background than usual. In fact, you may even want to reverse colors.
  • You’ll probably need other tweaks. I had to drill down through the Control Panel options to turn down the brightness to an acceptable level. The keyboard controls were not enough.
  • The chopped-off screen might make it harder to read PDFs and other files without reflowable formats.
  • Battery life is a mere 2.5-hour.
  • Most customer reviews are positive, but some people have ended up with lemons—apparently easily returned.
  • This is XP, with the usual virus risks: it isn’t as safe or as stable as Linux. Speaking of which, I dumped the McAfee virus program in favor of AVG, and the machine now seems zippier than before. With virus risks in mind, I also replaced Internet Explorer with Firefox, although Explorer may be better than before. I just didn’t want to take a chance.

If you own an Aspire or follow up on this post, I’ll welcome your impressions. Remember, my needs may be different from yours, and, again, keep in mind this is not an optimal display, either for e-book reading or Web browsing. Pages, as noted, will be cut short. But at $199—with laptop capabilities—what do you expect?

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