Acer Aspire One 722- AMD powered 11.6 inch mini laptop

The Aspire One series is Acer’s response to Asus Eee PC, meaning it’s a line of netbooks and mini laptops addressing both casual users and professionals. Now it’s time for another entry in the series, namely the Acer Aspire One 722, which is a 11.6 inch netbook/notebook, running on the AMD C-50 APU.

The chip is part of the highly successful Fusion line, that provides, on the same chip, a low power processor and HD graphics, which are compatible with DirectX 11 and can deal with HD graphics without too much of a problem.

The C-50 has a dual core, 1 GHZ processor and Radeon HD 6250 graphics, being a very decent entry level processor for netbooks. We’re used to see this processor on 10 inch models, on which it delivers good performance, usually paired up with 1 GB of RAM, Windows Starter and a 1024 x 600 display.

Acer decided to raise the stakes a little and put the APU on a 11 inch, 1366 x 768 display, while the rest of the specs of the device are kind of similar to many netbooks with smaller displays.

The 722 is practically identical to the AO522 (but slightly bigger), a previous model from the Aspire One line. It has the same design and components, excepting the pattern on the lid, named “water drop”, which is taken from another Acer netbook, namely the AOD257. There are a couple of concentric circles on the lid, like the effect you get when you throw a stone in still water. Another difference is the fact that the battery life was increased from 6 hours, on the AO522, to 7 hours, but that’s easily explainable by the fact that now there’s room for a larger battery.

The design is similar with that of previous Acer Aspire entries

Additionally, you get 1 GB of RAM, a 250 GB hard disk drive, Windows 7 Starter and the usual line up of ports, including USB, SD, audio jack and the works. As a bonus, there’s also a HDMI port, which is only natural, considering you have a HD compatible integrated video card.

In terms of pricing, we don’t have any info right now, but considering the specs and screen size, the 722 will probably lurk around the 400-450 bucks mark. It will be interesting to see if Acer will offer an upgrade for this one, when AMD’s C-60 will come out. It is basically the C-50, but with the option of overclocking one core when the other one is idle and with faster clock speeds for the video module.

Tags: 11.6" netbooks, AMD Ontario

Last updated: March 29, 2012 | Published: April 24th, 2011 | See the comments or add yours!