Acer Aspire One 722-BZ608

Hi. I'm Scott Stein, senior editor at Cnet.com and this is the Acer Aspire One 722-BZ608. Now, it looks like a netbook. It's about the same size as a netbook. It's a little larger. It's 11 inches for the screen and that puts it in sort of a in-between zone. If you're looking for a very portable or we call, ultra-portable type laptop, there are ones we've seen this year that are faster and better than the [unk] netbooks that we used to see all the time over the past couple of years and have grown somewhat slim and hard to find now that devices like the iPad are more popular. What you get out of something like this 11 incher here is a fast processor, more beefy specs- meaning a 500 GB hard drive and 4 GB of RAM on this model which is really what you find in your average 13 or 15-inch laptop and a pretty good price at $379. Now, the processor in here, why is it faster, it's kind of a relative term. It's an AMD C-50 which is much better than [unk] netbook for video streaming. So if you're watching NetFlix or Hulu on a little device like this, it streams it really well and that's important to note because [unk] netbooks don't. And if you're a video watcher, that's great but it's not really that impressive a feat because, heck, iPads, smartphones, gaming consoles can all stream NetFlix now and it's not really the domain of laptops necessarily anymore. But it's good for that, it's obviously not that great for gaming although it can play you causal game, your [unk] 3 that sort of thing. And that's about it. I mean it's about the size and weight of a 10-inch netbook. It's a little plasticky, and that goes into one of our issues which is the keyboard. The keyboard is mushy-feeling and it's not as nice as other keyboards we've seen although it is full-size. So if you're a big writer, someone who uses their netbook or portable [unk] to write and might wanna look for one with a slight better keyboard. But for its beefy specs, I mean, you put your whole music or photo library on to this and the 4 GB of RAM allows you to keep multiple programs open. So there you go. If you're a budget shopper and you're looking for something that's cheap under $400, take on the go, take a look at this Acer Aspire. But just remember, for a few dollars more, you get something a little bit faster and better. It's a difficult spectrum to navigate. I'm Scott Stein and that's a look at the Acer Aspire One 722-BZ608.