Acer Aspire One 532H is Acer's replacement for the popular 531H

The Acer Aspire One comparison – popular previous generation 10 inch netbook 531h versus the new Aspire One 532h with pine-trail processor and integrated graphics plus a nod towards the upcoming Acer Aspire One 532g with Nvidia Ion 2 graphics chip including Nvidia Optimas technology.

The 531h or AO531h, as it is also known, is an extremely popular and fairly lightweight netbook that can still be purchased at some very reasonable prices (Amazon UK have got it for £229.95 at the moment). The new pine-trail generation version, called the 532h with Atom N450 processor, Windows 7 and up to 8 hours battery life is now here and can be picked up for less than £300 from a number of places (3 good examples are Oyyy, Amazon UK and Laptops Direct).

We are very much looking forward to the 532g, which is due to be released in the next month or so and features Nvidia’s Ion 2 graphics chip with 512Mb memory plus their brand new Optimus switching technology. Optimus will come into play automatically when extra graphics capabilities are needed and saves a great deal of battery life when compared with an always on graphics chip such as the normal Nvidia Ion found on the HP Mini 311c. This should give the 532g a battery life close to 10 hours instead of the 311c’s 5 hours.

So three great netbooks, the 531h a year or so old, the 532h pretty much brand new and the 532g expected perhaps as early as the end of March but perhaps going to be a bit more expensive once it does hit the shops.

How do these great Acer Aspire One netbooks compare?

Related posts:

1. Acer Aspire One 532H Specification
2. Acer Aspire One 531 vs Acer Aspire One AOD150 comparison
3. Acer Aspire One D260 vs Aspire One 533 vs Aspire One 521

Reintroducing the netbook news from last year but with a different 2010-type slant on it. I thought it would be interesting to look at the most dugg articles from the last 30 days and pick up on the stories and announcements that got people digging.

This month the netbook news was almost completely dominated by the launch of the Apple iPad. During the launch presentation by Steve Jobs netbooks got a bit of a raw deal and a number of publications jumped to their defence, which generated lots of discussion.

1. 27th January - 10 Things Netbooks still do better than an iPad

1857 Diggs – CNet identify 10 areas where they believe that netbooks are better than the iPad including video chat, running flash, storage and typing on your lap although they do acknowledge that the iPad is more portable.

2. 27th January – Where Netbooks Still Beat The Apple iPad

593 Diggs – Computerworld provide us with a comparison of netbooks vs the iPad by way of a rundown of the major functions and which one wins. Each main area is covered such as Design, Screen, Web Surfing and Price with the conclusion reached that netbooks win on most of those areas. There are a few areas where it could be argued either way but otherwise it is fairly convincing that netbooks are better, and who are we to argue?

3. 27th January – Google And The iPad

397 Diggs – A commentry article by Quentin Hardy discussing how Google may not be that impressed with the iPad launch, as it has plans to bring out a netbook or tablet of its own, which will most likely be compared to the iPad even though its price point would be expected to be a lot lower. The 2 companies may be facing off against each other in a number of areas including Google’s Nexus One vs the iPhone and more besides.

4. 9th February – KDE Software Compilation 4.4.0 Introduces new innovations

377 Diggs – KDE release the latest version of their software compilation, which includes social networking and online collaboration features plus a new netbook-oriented interface. Lots of bug fixes and new feature requests have been dealt with.

5. 15th February – MeeGo: A New Linux OS to Fight iPhone, iPad and More

361 Diggs – The announcement that Nokia and Intel are forming MeeGo, a combination of Nokia’s Maemo and Intel’s Moblin operatings systems, which are both Linux-based. Apparently this is not going to replace Symbian but developers will be able to deploy their apps to MeeGo and other platforms, including Symbian. MeeGo is due to arrive during the second quarter of 2010.

6. 15th February – Acer Announces Aspire One 532g, With NVIDIA Optimus Tech and Next-Gen NVIDIA Ion

324 Diggs – Hot Hardware covering the announcement from Acer that the 532G will use Nvidia’s Ion 2 for some serious graphics power but will switch to the integrated graphics when it is not required using Nvidia’s Optimus technology. Other than that the 532G is a pine-trail type netbook with an Atom N450, 2Gb RAM, 320Gb hard disk, 10 inch screen and battery life of up to 10 hours. Available in 3 colours, no pricing details as yet.

7. 2nd February – 42 Reasons Why Netbooks Are Better Than the Apple iPad

199 Diggs – PC Mag have managed to put 42 reasons together on why netbooks are better than the iPad so they are going for it in a big way. We start with the predictable ones such as netbooks are cheaper, netbooks have flash, netbooks can multitask and move onto reasons such as the Dell Mini 10v has a TV tuner and netbooks with NVidia Ion have support for blu-ray drives.

I’m not knocking the article at all, I think it is great that there are 42 reasons why netbooks are better than the iPad, I just think that trying to come up with so many reasons may seem that PC Mag is a little worried. Granted, CNet and Computerworld have done something very similar and, once the iPad is launched, a lot of Apple lovers will buy it because it is made by Apple, looks nice and has a big touchscreen.

These people have been buying Apple products for years, they bought the iPhone before it had 3G, they bought the MacBook Air even though it only had 1 USB port. I just don’t think that they will really care that there are 42 reasons why netbooks are better. For what it is worth, I think that netbooks are better and are far more useful pieces of equipment than they are sometimes given credit for.

8. 9th February – Nvidia Optimus: What You Need to Know

177 Diggs – Another PC Mag article, this one looking at Nvidia’s Optimus technology, which is all about switchable graphics, going from integrated graphics to discrete graphics depending on the task. This approach has been around for a while but nobody really uses it according to Nvidia. Their Optimus technology makes this switching seamless and PC Mag go on to explain how it works, whether it does work and their conclusion. Of course, we’ve also just seen that Acer are using Nvidia’s Optimus technology in their forthcoming 532G.

9. 1st February – Google’s tablet UI concept demo

174 Diggs – This time a video, posted on Youtube and lasting for 42 seconds, showing a demo of Google’s tablet user interface. I couldn’t really see what was going on that clearly as it was just a concept but it has been viewed over 200,000 times so is obviously pretty popular.

10. 20th January – Deloitte’s TMT report highlights rise of the tablet PC

163 Diggs – Just sneaking into this first roundup of the most popular stories from the last 30 days is this article from GeekWithLaptop investigating a report from Deloitte, which states that ‘NetTabs will be purchased by tens of millions of people in 2010′. It tooks me a while to realise that they were talking about tablets, were of course eluding to the iPad expecting to sell well (although not guaranteed) and other manufacturers also releasing tablets. So this is the year of the tablet, but do we really have to call them NetTabs?

That rounds up the most popular netbook news stories from the past 30 days and I hope you found them interesting.

Let me know what you think of the revised netbook news format and the content, any feedback is always gratefully received.

Related posts:

1. Netbook News Roundup – 18th July 2009
2. Netbook News Roundup – 26th September 2009
3. Netbook News Roundup – 7th November 2009