I rounded up three (3) UMPC in the 8.9 inch range and set them side by side to see which one gets your money’s worth — Acer Aspire One, HP 2133 Mini-note and the Asus Eee PC 900. Just like our 7-inch round-up, this chart will hopefully help you in your next purchase.
I’ve actually added the recently launched MSI Wind in the mix even if it’s in the 10-inch range already. We’ll have to wait for the official Philippine launch of the 10″ Asus Eee PC 1000 on July 29 too.
A quick look will give you an obvious hint that the Acer Aspire One is a clear winner, primarily because of the price. The 512MB on-board memory can still be upgraded by adding in a 2GB RAM stick, effectively giving you 2.5GB. Likewise there’s an option to get an 80GB HDD instead of the 8GB SSD. The RAM and HDD upgrade could pad the price by around Php5k so even at Php24k, it’s still a good buy and at par with the MSI Wind.
The MSI Wind is already in the 10″ level but I added that one in the chart to give us a better perspective. A 2GB RAM for the laptop is about Php2.5k so getting the MSI Wind and upgrade the RAM to 2GB for a total of Php26.5k is also a nice option.
At this point, the Asus Eee PC 900 and HP Mini-note seems to be trailing. The Eee PC 901 which comes with an Intel Atom 1.6GHz is not available locally while the faster 1.6GHz HP 2133 is still expensive at Php35k.
On the battery life, the lower the watts per hour consumption, the better. The Celeron is a juice-guzzler while the Intel Atom certainly shows you get 50% better power consumption.
Will be attending a workshop this Friday on how to properly benchmark netbooks the 3 of the 4 listed above will be tested head to head. It should be interesting.
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I’ll go for the MSI Wind…upgradable to 1G memory 80 HDD…6-ion cell battery available by end of July (4-5K according to PC corner) that covers 6 hours…Microsoft XP OS, bigger screen and keyboard but still super portable.
@allan - thanks for the correction. My Excel is showing Suse with my correction but forgot to re-upload the image.
Get your specs right yuga! the 2133 1.2 / Vista basic is actually 29,995 not 24,995.
hayyy why did hp bundled it with vista??? sayang
@hootie2t I believe Acer will be announcing its HDD model Aspire one come August. By that time, the Dell E series would’ve already been launched.
The big issue with the 8GB Aspire one really is the slow SSD write (or even read) speed when using OSes other than the bundled Linpux Linux lite.
Also, news has it that HP is planning a cheaper Mini note. While that may take some time, it might still be worth the wait.
Where do we get the upgrade for the 80GB Hard Drive for the Acer Aspire One?
All stores I’ve been don’t seem to know about that whenever I ask about it. Been to PC Corner, Villman, and several others along Gilmore.
Please help, Yuga.
Go for the MSI Wind!
It works with Mac OS X Leopard. Check out my writeup about it: http://katext.com/katexter/blog/264/