Acer Aspire v5-122p Ultra-Thin Touchscreen Notebook

Acer Aspire v5-122p-0825 
Ultra-Thin Touchscreen Notebook

Specs:

CPU: AMD A4-1250 Dual Core @ 1GHz
GPU: AMD Radeon HD 8210
RAM: 4 GB DDR3 Low Voltage (2GB on board + 2 GB SODIMM)
HDD: Western Digital 500GB 5400rpm SATA3
LCD: 11.6" Glossy Widescreen Multitouch LCD
Audio: RealTek HD
Network: Qualcomm Atheros AR95x 802.11 b/g/n + BlueTooth
Peripherals: 83-key non-backlit keyboard, touchpad, 2x USB (1xUSB3, 1xUSB2),  CrystalEye webcam, SD/MicroSD Card-reader
Battery: 3-cell Lithium Ion

Although I own a bevy of tablet- and laptop computers, when I expect to work away from home, I tend to bring my trusty netbook along for the ride. Tablets are wonderful media-consumption devices, but absolutely terrible if you want to do any real work, and laptops just can't compare with the portability and battery life of a a net- or ultra-book. Unfortunately, my 5-year old Dell Inspiron Mini10T - with its limited 1GB RAM and 1GHz Atom processor - was proving incapable of handing the demands of modern operating systems and applications. Don't get me wrong; I loved my little Dell but after waiting five minutes for it to boot MS Windows 7 and load up a single document, I realized it was time for an upgrade.

Netbooks are becoming a rare breed these days, with their niche largely taken over by tablets. What few exist tend to be either underpowered and cheap, or rival laptops in both performance and price, but very little between the two extremes. But - having desktop powerhouses at home - I was more concerned with price than performance and ultimately settled for the Acer Aspire v5-122p.

My demands were simple: I wanted a machine that I could carry around everywhere, and one that would let me get to work almost as soon as I opened it up. A slightly larger screen would be welcome too. Raw power and battery life were secondary concerns.

The Aspire v5 is no powerhouse; my gaming PC is roughly 20 times in every category of the 3DMark benchmark. When it comes to modern games, it is a complete failure; some won't even start and for those that do, the frame-rates are in the single-digits. But it shines for those ordinary, mundane tasks: word-processing, email, surfing the web.

Most impressively is its boot-time, although that might have as much to do with Windows 8.1. Still,

going from pressing the power button to the desktop in less than 30 seconds without an SSD is still an impressive feat. Applications open fairly swiftly as well (9 seconds for LibreOffice, 8 seconds for Firefox*, 7 for Thunderbird). The interface remains snappy throughout, thanks to the dual cores and Windows 8's improved threading. The Aspire v5's performance is in no way jaw-dropping - compared to other PCs, it's average at best, if not a bit pokey - but it is still fast enough that you end up grinding your teeth waiting for it to chug through basic tasks.

The rest of the hardware is fairly mundane. The 500GB hard-drive is spacious enough to hold most of the data you will need "on the go". The Radeon 8210 HD is adequate for apps and playing video (it even handles BluRay-quality movies with aplomb). Audio is handled by RealTek HD integrated audio; the speakers - located on the bottom of the chassis - are surprisingly loud and clear although, due to the size of the netbook - channel separation is difficult to make out. The CrystalEye webcam is nominally HD but - while functional - still outputs grainy, low-res video. The glossy widescreen LCD is a bit dim; adequate for indoor work but difficult to use outside in the sun. It features 10-point multi-touch capabilities though, should you have any desire to smear up your display pointlessly. On the other hand, it has a fairly wide viewing angle so I wasn't constantly struggling to keep my head perfectly centered lest the image appear washed out.

The entire computer weighs in at a barely noticeable 3.3 pounds. Made of thin plastic, the chassis does feel a bit frail, and I worry it might not stand up to excessive wear. It features a 3-cell Lithium Ion battery with a 3-hour life. The battery is non-removable, although it can be extended with the addition of an optional second battery ($99). The case features only a minimum of ports: two USB  ports, a slot for an SD/MicroSD card-reader, a headphone jack and a port for a proprietary expansion dongle. The dongle that comes with the laptop only has a VGA port, but a more robust dongle adds an additional USB port and an Ethernet jack ($35). I do sort of miss having an integrated Ethernet jack since I like to use my netbooks to troubleshoot routers - which is best done when wired - but I can understand why it was dropped from newer machines. Anyway, the dongle does allow me to have the best of both worlds, even if it is a bit of a kludge.

The power button is somewhat inconveniently located on the side of the computer. The widely-spaced 83-key keyboard is somewhat reminiscent of the chiclet keyboards of years past, but is surprisingly useable (still, I recommend interested buyers stop by a store and see how it feels first; it is definitely a love-it or hate-it thing). Like most ultra-small laptops, the touchpad is far too inconveniently located and I strongly recommend getting a wireless mouse and disabling it entirely.

The Aspire v5-122p comes preloaded with Windows 8.1, which is only slightly less horrid than Windows 8.0. Unfortunately, driver support for older versions of Windows is difficult to come by. On the other hand, with the use of software such as Classic Shell and Windows Update Notifier (not to mention third-party applications such as Irfanview for images, SumatraPDF for e-books and LibreOffice for word-processing), the dreadful and unintuitive "Modern" interface can be practically obliterated, leaving you with a Win7 or WinXP look, if you so desire. The machine comes pre-installed with the usual useless bloatware, including McAfee Antivirus, Norton Online Backup, a 30-day trial for Microsoft Office 2013 and a host of mostly useless Acer apps (all of which utilize the "Modern" app interface and were thus immediately banished from this machine). Disappointingly, the Skydrive desktop app no longer works with Windows 8.1, so - unless you use your MS Live ID to log-in to your PC - you will be forced to use your web-browser to access Microsoft's cloud storage (I just installed Dropbox instead).

This little ultra-thin netbook is not exceptional piece of hardware in any area, but it is servicable computer. Extremely lightweight, it is easy to carry around anywhere, and its fast boot-time means you can jump right into your workflow with a minimum of wait. It is also fairly inexpensive - I picked up mine for just over $300 - so it won't set you back too much. If you need a portable computer to  complement your primary desktop or laptop, it isn't a bad choice so long as you understand its limits. It's a great machine for surfing the web or doing a quick bit of writing or programming on the road, but if you are interested in gaming or work with CPU-intensive programs you are going to want to look somewhere else.

* without any extensions. With my normal complement of 20 extensions, including Adblock and Ghostery, Firefox takes up to 25 seconds to load. Blame the extensions, not the CPU.

iPad

Remember back when you were a kid and you were the first to get that hot new toy all the other kids lusted after? Instant popularity was yours as soon as you walked into the classroom; everyone wanted to see it, touch it, play with it, ask you about it. If you walk into the office with an Apple iPad, the exact same thing happens. Unfortunately, fame thus received as fleeting as it was in your youth, and soon enough you are just an average schmoe again, except with a useless plastic toy to your name. The Apple iPad is like that too.

I received an iPad as a gift. I'd like to say -especially after my scathing preview a few months back- that had I not gotten the tablet as a present I never would have owned one, but in all honesty I cannot. Likely I would have waited a year before I bought it, but the allure of tablet computing is difficult for a geek to resist, even those of us who recognize the platform's disadvantages ahead of time. Nonetheless, despite having nothing more invested in the product than appreciation towards the person who had gifted it to me, I endeavored to find utility for the device. For the past two weeks, it has gone almost everywhere I have gone, and where I might otherwise have used a computer or hand-held, I used the iPad. Surely somewhere in all those tasks the iPad would prove its worth.

The iPad has a glossy screen

People who have not used an iPad might find this an unduly negative start to a review. After all, the tablet is some impressive hardware. From it's glossy ten-inch screen to its speedy 1 GHz Apple A4 processor, it is stylish and powerful. Advocates point to the more than 100,000 applications available as indications of its flexibility and adaptability to almost every usage scenario. Desktops (and even laptops) are too cumbersome, hand-held devices are too limited; surely a tablet PC is the optimal solution.

But the sad fact is, the iPad is not the solution. It has the technical capability but its form factor is its greatest weakness. True, it can perform most tasks you might otherwise turn to a laptop or desktop computer, but its limitations quickly become evident. Similarly, it has the portability of a hand-held, but -four times larger- not the convenience. It is not the revolutionary new computing  paradigm promised by Apple. It is a toy that, at best, has a few niche applications it might be ideal for but otherwise fails to better its competitors in any way.

The on-screen keyboard

One of the first uses I put the iPad to was e-mail; jumping between offices, I found it necessary to keep in contact with my peers in multiple locations. Normally, I might jot down a few terse messages on my iPhone until I could reach a "proper" computer where I could type out a detailed message, but surely the iPad -with its bigger screen and keyboard- would allow me to write out those longer e-mails on the road. And, true, the capability was there, but after a few messages I found myself reverting to my old habits. The iPad on-screen keyboard is horrid, not only due to its lack of tactile feedback but also for its layout; numbers and commonly-used punctuation are hidden layers deep which greatly impede typing speed. Before too long, e-mail sent from my iPad started to assume the usual Frankensteinian diction common to any e-mail I send from a portable device. As far as e-mail was concerned, I might as well have been using the iPhone; at least that had the advantage in size.

Safari lacks many features

But surely as a web-browser the iPad would be a superior experience to any smartphone? Certainly its smaller screen improved on readability, although I was still frequently zooming in to read anything but the headlines. Fat fingers always made clicking links an exercise in frustration, and the limitations of the browser (no Flash, limited javascript, no add-ons) meant that many websites did not function as expected. Furthermore, the problems with the keyboard again came into effect; these days I do more than simply surf the web and ingest content. I like to give back with stories or comments of my own and typing anything of length on the iPad keyboard is just not an option.

iBook is pretty but not feature-rich

A much touted feature of the iPad was its use as an e-book reader. In this I found some success. The iBook application is gorgeous, although e-book fanatics might find fault with the too-bright screen and fonts. But I found the iPad's form-factor to be uncomfortable for extended periods of reading. It's just a bit too large to comfortably curl up around and -even at only 1.5 pounds- after half an hour of holding the tablet up I started to feel it in my wrist. The Kindle -roughly two-thirds the size of the iPad- is the ideal dimensions for reading e-books; the iPad is not. Nonetheless, there was one area I found the iPad to be superior: reading multiple-column text or PDFs. These are too big for hand-helds and can't be comfortably read on a laptop; the iPad was the perfect platform for this format. Unfortunately, the iPad didn't come with a built-in PDF reader, requiring me to purchase an application separately.

Similarly, the iPad has limited success as a portable media device. It is terrible as a music player; although it has all the features of Apple's iPhone or iPod Touch music players, its form factor completely negates its usability in this area; you can't stick the iPad in your pocket and go out for a brisk jog. On the other hand, it plays videos fairly well and -despite initial worries- I only came across a handful of websites where I could not stream the video from the Internet (Hulu.Com is, of course, the most notable exception). Still, I have to wonder at the utility of this feature; whenever I was traveling, watching video was the last thing I wanted to do, and when I was at home the better option was always to watch the video on the HDTV or big-screen monitor.

Zombieville USA on the iPad is a kick-ass game

Of course, there are always the 100,000 other applications you can use. Some are quite nice, but -again- all are limited by the platform itself. The games tend to be fairly shallow and lack in variety; they are fun for short periods of time but you aren't going to keep at these games for more than fifteen minutes before you tire of them. As for productivity applications, well, do I have to bring up the input limitations again? The keyboard is terrible for anything beyond the shortest of comments and the touch-interface will hardly replace a mouse for accuracy. Nor do the limitations of the OS improve things; no multi-tasking and no easy way to move files on or off the platform mean it will never replace a dedicated workstation.

So what's the final verdict? Well, if you ask me, it's a cute toy, but even its most dedicated fans will have to admit that it just can't replace the computing platforms already available. For all its versatility, users will still want to keep a hand-held device and a dedicated computer around for their day-to-day work. The iPad is too big to replace the former, and too limited in functionality to replace the former. So why should anyone ever buy one?