Between the downward spiral of the economy and the major increase in notebook sales, in the span of 18 months, the netbook category has essentially risen from foretold legend of $300 laptops to a small niche for those wanting a secondary computer, before exploding into the mainstream behind the strength of such models as the EEE 900, and more recently, the Acer Aspire One and MSI Wind. Not content to let the niche computer companies have all the fun, HP released its contender, the Mini 1000, to the fray earlier this year. Can the smaller Taiwanese manufacturers hold off the global powerhouse? Read on to find out.
Having recently taken the title of best selling netbook of all time, Acer’s Aspire One doesn’t appear to be slowing down anytime soon, with a mid-life refresh adding a few new SKUs, including a 16GB solid state disk, and two new colours, pink and brown, to go along with the previous black, blue, and white. Our configuration is the most popular one, the cheapest configuration with a mechanical hard drive (120GB, in this case), to go along with the Atom processor, 8.9” WSVGA screen and 3 cell battery.
And now to these two, we add the venerable MSI Wind. The first major update to the netbook paradigm since the original Asus EEE 701, the Wind has set the standard for all new netbooks since its release early this year, since it was the first netbook to combine the Intel Atom mobile chip, a truly usable keyboard, and a 10” screen for a reasonable price. We are testing the base model, which features identical specs to our Aspire One – 1.6GHz Atom, 120GB hard drive, and a 3 cell battery – at an identical $349 price tag.
On paper, the three netbooks are about as evenly matched in terms of performance and features as can be expected, but how do they stack up in real life usage?
Design
In terms of aesthetics, the HP blows away the other two netbooks, and really, almost every other netbook out there. Very sleek and stylish, yet understated and simple, the HP is also noticeably thinner than the other two. I originally questioned their use of a 1.8” hard drive, but that is likely what allowed them to make the HP so slim. The lid of the HP features HP’s now famous Imprint design, with a silver swirl pattern on the glossy black lid. Impressively, it appears quite resistant to fingerprints as well, which is more than can be said for the standard HP notebooks. Opening up the netbook, the first thing you notice is the flush bezel for screen, called “Infinity Brightview” in HP’s marketing literature and “annoyingly glossy” by everyone else, though the HP is not nearly as bad as the glass screens in the new Apple notebooks. However, the matter of fingerprints shows up in a big way here. Touching anywhere around the screen bezel instantly results in an ugly fingerprint. The body of the netbook is a matte black, so thankfully, no fingerprints there. The keyboard dominates the body, with a decently sized touchpad squeezed in there as well, but the mouse buttons had to be pushed to the sides of the touchpad. The build quality is pretty much faultless, theres no flex in the interior of the laptop, and the lid is pretty solid as well. The hinge integrates the speakers and is rendered in a silver metal that creates an attractive visual contrast between the gloss of the bezel and the matte black of the body. The hinge design is similar to that of the aluminum MacBook, with the screen sitting behind the body of the netbook when open, so the overall height is lower than the rest of the notebook. Unfortunately, the hinge doesn’t seem quite up to the task of keeping the latchless lid closed all the time, and there is a noticeable gap between the lid and body when the laptop is closed. Overall though, the HP Mini 1000 is very well designed.
The Wind has a much more conservative design. The lid has a mildly glossy white finish, with a stylized MSI logo rendered in silver. Opening the lid, we see *gasp* a matte finish screen. Awesome, that’s what that is, but we’ll get to the screens in a minute. The body tapers down at a slight angle, so there is a distinct wedge shape in the profile of the netbook. The LCD bezel is a bit thick, and the whole interior of the laptop is done in a dull, monotonous off-white plastic. The white keyboard is likely to get dirty quickly, so I’d advise getting the black Wind as opposed to the white test unit we have. The touchpad has a 4:3 aspect ratio, which seems like a minor oversight, since the screen has a widescreen ratio, and the buttons are placed properly like on a normal laptop. The build quality is not the greatest, with the palm rest showing some flex and such, but the lid is pretty solid. The hinge is also a stable piece, using a design similar to the Sony FJ, and the lid is held secure by magnets, as with the MacBook, and not like the HP and Acer, which use the strength of the hinge itself to keep the lid closed. Overall, the Wind comes across as having a very safe design, with minimal risks taken and not many inherent flaws.
The Acer is a different story. It’s styled reasonably well, with a glossy and extremely fingerprint attracting lid done in a dark, metallic blue and orange accents on the hinges, but the lid is very flexible and deforms with even mild applied loads. The inside of the bezel is glossy as well, as is the screen. The body of the notebook is matte, however, which is good for both feel and look. Unfortunately, the interior plastic shows major flex, similar to the lid, and overall, the netbook imparts a feeling of low quality build. This makes it feel too fragile to carry on a daily basis, where the daily grind of a student is known for putting major stress on any mobile device. The bezel is pretty large, resulting in dimensions that are nearly the same as the HP, which is slightly wider, but the same height and thinner. In fact, the Acer’s carrying case fits the HP very well, almost better than it fits the Acer itself. At first glance, the hinge appears to be a circular bamboo hinge design, as on the Asus W3 line, noteworthy for being the most durable type of hinge. However, opening the Aspire One, it’s immediately clear that it is the same type of hinge as the Wind, only with circular design elements. The hinge feels solid though, and keeps the notebook shut with a spring loaded mechanism. The Acer feels unnervingly cheap, far more than the identically priced MSI does, and the Aspire One’s major quality pitfalls are quite glaring in comparison to the other netbooks in its class. Interestingly, a friend of mine who purchased an identical Aspire One the day after I did reports no major flex other than the right side of the keyboard, so it is maybe that I got a poorly made unit, but there is no further evidence to posit anything of the sort.
In terms of ports, the Acer and MSI have an identical and fairly standard selection of ports, with 3 USBs, Ethernet, VGA, headphone, mic, and a memory card reader to their credit. The HP is different, in some ways good and some ways dreadful. It has two USB ports, Ethernet (hidden behind a rubber cover), eSATA, combo headphone/mic (like a smartphone), and a memory card reader. That’s it – no video out. I understand that its not supposed to be a real laptop or a replacement for a laptop, but some kind of video out should have been there. I like the eSATA, but its not really as useful as it could be due to the slow write speed of the hard disk. The combined audio in/out jack could be a problem for some, though I personally like it since it means I can just use my iPhone headset for video calls and such. Even still, there are so many problems with the HP’s selection of ports that I didn’t even get the chance to complain about the feeble number of USB ports. All three of the netbooks have a webcam and microphone built in above the screen, and all work reasonably well.
Usability
Both the MSI and the HP have pretty good screens, but I must give the MSI the better rating here. Why? It has a matte screen, last of a dying breed. The HP has a quite nice screen, with the bezel-less screen, and isn’t even that glossy as far as that type of screen goes, but it cannot top a matte screen in all around usability. It is very nice for video though, with the single pane design and the glossy finish. The Acer has a smaller 8.9” screen with the same resolution as the other two, which makes it slightly sharper. However, the screen is far too bright at the brightest setting, and with only 5 closely spaced steps for the brightness control (The MSI has 8 and the HP 10), it doesn’t get very dark either, so one ends up using it in the two darkest settings at all times, though in dark environments, even the lowest brightness level is too bright. Also, the colours are off – the Acer’s colour gamut is too warm. The HP is much closer to neutral, with the MSI having slightly cool colours, but nothing as off as with the Acer. Essentially, between the MSI and HP it is very close, with the HP having the edge with video content, and the MSI being slightly better everywhere else.
Front row, L to R: HP Mini 1000, MSI Wind, Acer Aspire One...The three in the back are my laptop, my iMac and my Sony LCD.
In keyboards too, the MSI and HP are very close, and once again, the Acer trails pretty far behind. Both the HP and MSI are very comfortable to type on, with spacious keys, for a nearly full sized keyboard. The HP has flat keys with no space between them and no tapering edges on the keys themselves, so it has larger key area, but the keypresses themselves are shallower than with the MSI. For sheer typing, I prefer the MSI due to the longer key strokes, but the HP has a very “new age” feeling keyboard, akin to typing on a Sony ultraportable – its an interesting feeling that some might prefer to the more conventional look and feel of the MSI. Overall, I do rate the HP higher here, since it has a very standard layout, while the Wind has a layout that is identical to the MSI GX600 I have, which has easily the most screwed up keyboard I’ve ever dealt with. I don’t mind having the Fn and Ctrl keys switched, but the period, comma, and slash keys are all squished for the purpose of having full sized arrow keys, which I simply don’t understand – why even bother? Half sized arrow keys work just as well and those three keys are easily some of the most used punctuation keys. Confounding and unorthodox layout aside, the MSI has a great keyboard. Its probably about as close to a ThinkPad as you can get in a netbook, until Lenovo releases a ThinkPad N series netbook or something (which I don’t think is in the plans….yet. Awesome if it is though.) The Acer has far and away the worst keyboard here. The layout is ok, but the keys themselves are far smaller than on the Wind and Mini 1000, so its much more difficult to type on. Theres flex like crazy on the right side of the keyboard, which is nearly as bothering as the small keys, and theres still a noticeable amount of flex on the left side of the keyboard as well. Not so hot as far as the quality goes. The layout is ok, but the Fn keys are mapped weird – brightness and volume controls are on the arrow keys (Dell does this too, I think. Personally I think its just weird, but maybe some people like it.) I’d have rated it lower, but I must give it a shout out for having dedicated Page Up and Page Down buttons, instead of relegating those to Fn based keys on the arrows. Unfortunately, those dedicated Page Up/Down keys forced Acer to make the keyboard non-rectangular, which really does ruin the form of the interior of the device.
Touchpads are pretty mediocre all around, with the Acer and HP featuring the mouse buttons moved to the sides of the touchpad, and the MSI keeping the conventional layout of the mouse button underneath the touchpad. I think I prefer moving the buttons to the side of the touchpad, with one condition – the touchpads need to be easy to tap-click on. Its something I do on my normal laptops quite frequently anyways, and with the moved button layout, its what I ended up doing pretty much all the time with the HP and Acer, except for when I needed a right click. Unfortunately, while the HP tap-clicks very well, the Acer is quite difficult to tap click on, and the buttons themselves are not so great either, with very shallow motion and a hollow sounding noise when clicked. The MSI has a 4:3 ratio touchpad, an ergonomic rarity in this day of widescreen laptops. Thus, due to the need to fit the mouse buttons under the touchpad, the pad had to be shrunk to fit the body of the netbook, which means it feels a bit undersized. Nothing too awful (read: EEE 701 and 900) but not as good as it could have been. The button is somewhat small as well, and while the single-button look is a nice touch à la Asus W3J, the lack of distinction between the left and right mouse buttons could be a problem for some. Regardless, the MSI touchpad is easy to use and pretty ergonomic, so there isn’t anything really wrong with it in its current state, just a few things that could be improved upon.
Performance
This is the real telling point of the entire netbook class – if they can’t handle basic everyday tasks like internet, word processing, and basic multimedia, these things are completely worthless. For office tasks, all of them are pretty solid, having essentially the same hardware (1.6GHz Atom, 1GB of memory, and a hard disk), however, in file transfers, the HP is a bit slower than the others due to the slower hard disk, so I docked it a point, but other than that, all three are pretty capable machines, easily good enough for running Firefox, Word, and iTunes at the same time without having to breathe hard.
Multimedia capability is a different story. They all do the music thing pretty well, as with low res and DVD quality video, but trying any kind of HD essentially kills them. A 720p tennis match (the 2007 US Open Final, Roger Federer v Novak Djokovic) played in slideshow quality, which clearly shows the lack of processing power. However, with a screen so small that it can’t fully display an HD video, theres not much of a point to it, and nobody buying a netbook will be using it for HD content, but it was still good to know what the machines are capable of. The HP had the best screen for watching movies, as said before, due to the glossy, cinematic screen finish, with the MSI being close as well, and the Acer’s smaller screen being alright for viewing videos as well. As far as speakers go, the HP’s hinge-located system was quite good, nearly as good as my laptop, though typically lacking in bass response (even compared to an already bass-light notebook). The MSI had pretty mediocre speakers, with low volume limit and some distortion at the higher ends, but decent enough for YouTube videos and the occasional mp3 file. My advice? Bring a decent set of headphones for any serious listening. Same goes for the Aspire One, which had a pretty abysmal set of speakers, being more comparable to an iPhone speakerphone than a notebook. Extremely tinny sound, barely good enough for basic system sounds (at high volumes, it kills the Windows startup sound), much less anything else.
As far as boot times go, the Wind takes 33 seconds to get to the XP login screen, the Aspire One takes 27 seconds, and the HP takes a hair over 38 seconds to do the same, a time presumably lengthened by its slower hard drive. For comparison, my laptop (2GHz Core 2 Duo) takes roughly 35 seconds to reach the boot screen of Vista.
And we come to battery life, one of the most important factors in any mobile device, whether it be a smartphone, a netbook, or a laptop. All three of the netbooks here have 3 cell batteries, with the Wind and Aspire One having optional 6 cell batteries (and a rumoured/spied but as of yet unreleased 9 cell battery for the Wind as well), and the HP supposed to get some sort of extended battery sometime in January. The Acer has a 23 W-hr battery, the MSI a slightly larger 24 W-hr unit, while the HP features a 26 W-hr piece. I didn’t do any exact battery life testing, but my unscientific test of basic usage (Firefox + iTunes in the background) at medium backlight brightness resulted in around 2 hours of runtime for both the MSI and the Acer, with the HP scoring roughly 2.5 hours of battery life. This is just my observation after running down the batteries multiple times. I’m guessing the HP has slightly longer battery life due to the slightly larger battery and the smaller, slower, and less power consuming 1.8” hard disk.
However, this yet-to-be-detailed higher capacity battery for the HP has me slightly worried, because the way the battery is positioned in the HP, covering most of the bottom and just being popped out (as opposed to the Wind, Aspire One, and many laptops, where the battery is at the very back of the laptop and slides out, so an extended cell battery will just stick out of the back), there is no easy way for them to integrate a significantly larger battery. I’m guessing what they’ll do is just compress a 4 cell battery in the same space as the current 3 cell and sell it for $30 more. There just isn’t space for them to fit a large 6 or 8 cell battery in this. With the 6 cell batteries, the Wind and Aspire One owners should be getting around 5-6 hours of battery life, and if the HP got a similarly large battery, I’d expect about that as well.
Conclusion
As you’ve probably read, the best-selling Aspire One got completely outclassed in this comparison by both the HP and the Wind. Why is it still the best selling netbook and probably not about to lose that perch anytime soon? Because it really is, in many places, the only available netbook, like at Walmart and RadioShack and the like. And usually, it’s the least expensive too, but with the MSI Wind’s latest price drops, it really cannot compete on pricing either. It’s just too small, too poorly designed, and too shoddily constructed to truly be a mobile traveling companion, which leaves the Wind and the HP as the competitors. They were much closer together, and the decision really could come down to the flip of a coin between the two. The Mini 1000 is quite honestly the better computer here, with excellent design and features, and probably the most polished overall package in the netbook world at the moment. However, it is quite a bit more costly than the Wind, retailing for $449 instead of $349, and combined with the fact that there really isn’t anything wrong with the very conservative and safe Wind, in the point totals, out of 150, the two were separated by a grand total of…1 point. By the smallest of possible margins, the Mini 1000 takes it, using its style and all around prowess to beat out the value priced, but still extremely competent Wind. What I really liked about the HP is that it brought the expensive ultraportable feel down to the netbook class. While nobody will mistake the Mini 1000 for the latest $4000, carbon fiber Sony or Toshiba ultraportable, it feels like so much more than just a $450 computer, and in that, it is the deserving winner.
| netbook | HP Mini | MSI Wind | Aspire One |
| design | |||
| aesthetics (10) | 10 | 8 | 7 |
| ports (5) | 2 | 4 | 4 |
| build quality (20) | 18 | 15 | 12 |
| usability | |||
| screen (10) | 8 | 9 | 7 |
| keyboard (10) | 9 | 8 | 7 |
| mouse (5) | 4 | 4 | 2 |
| performance | |||
| basic tasks (10) | 7 | 8 | 8 |
| multimedia (10) | 9 | 7 | 5 |
| boot time (5) | 3 | 4 | 5 |
| battery life (15) | 13 | 10 | 10 |
| price (25) | 15 | 25 | 25 |
| gotta have it (25) | 25 | 20 | 10 |
| TOTAL (150) | 123 | 122 | 102 |
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