Saw one of these recently at a local store..
OK, so probably thinking “solid State”? but aren’t all laptops solid state? Well yeah, except that they have a hard drive that has moving parts and can be aversely affected by vibration and jostling when being transported on the motorcycle. And are prone to being damaged when you’re moving around with them turned on. Plus they are affected by temps, humidity and other environmental conditions.
Sure hard drives today are all ‘Self Parking” so the heads automatically retract to prevent them from banging on the platters unlike the days of yor when you had actually use a command to park them, but they are still prone to being damaged when you’re moving around with them turned on.
The Acer Aspire One mini-laptop
http://www.acer.com/aspireone/
I first saw this one a few weeks ago at Office Depot and what caught my eye was first off its size. At 10 x 1.2 x 9 inches and slightly over 2 pounds, its really small and looked pretty “toy” like, but after doing some research it seems this really is a full-fledged computer not a toy at all. The screen is 1024x800 packed down to 8.9 inches, great resolution and comes with a decently fast 1.66 Mhz cpu and a full set of apps. And the price ranges from as low as $290 to around $400. Wow, a real working laptop, with wireless, 2 card slots and all the interfaces found on a standard laptop for Under $300, pretty kool. And the best part is that the cheapest version is the one that would best fit the motorcyclist in need of a portable because it comes with a “solid state” drive, i.e. no moving parts. At first I thought that having only 8 gig of storage space might be an issue, but for its intended use, that’s really all you need. The lower priced version also comes with loaded with a Linix OS and OpenOffice which is every bit as good as MS office, in fact I like it better and its totally free, it will even read all MS documents, spreadsheets, and all standard office apps and can save them to the same format. Plus with the additional two card slots, one multi-format and one dedicated SD slot that will handle up to an 8 Gig card to act as additional drive space. I can’t see that there is really anything it lacks for road warrior use and at under $300, its almost a throw away item, price wise its less than many GPSs out there. I tried out the keyboard and its pretty decent, a bit smaller than standard but still big enough to touch type on with no problems.
The first reviews did mention a few bugs but they seem to have been worked out and they noted that they were testing on pre-production models. You can also get it with up to a 160 Gig standard HD and windows XP but that’s really over kill for what I would see would be the main reason to have one on the road.
Pretty cool and its one of those things that sorely temp me!
RM