Acer Aspire One 721 and Gateway LT32 – brother 11.6 inchers

More 11.6 inch mini laptops with AMD hardware pop out these days. The Gateway LT32 and Acer Aspire One 721 are two of them. I’m writing about both of them in the same post because they are identical both in terms of looks and features, although there is a small but significant difference between them.

You can get an idea on their looks from the picture below. Solid construction, decent materials, but nothing fancy. It’s nice to have the full-size keyboard I also have on my Acer 1825PT, plus what seems to be a properly sized trackpad.

Acer Aspire One 721

Inside are the goodies. Like I’ve said, both these machines are built on the AMD Nile platform, with the single core Athlon 2 Neo K125 (1.7 GHz), 2 GB of memory, ATI Radeon HD4225 graphics and 250 GB of storage space. Other features include 1.3 MPx webcam, WiFi N but not Bluetooth, card reader, good audio and Windows 7 Home Premium. Plus the 11.6 inch display with 1366 x 768 px resolution.

All these allow the machines to run nearly all your daily applications and handle 1080p HD content well (self stored and Flash from Youtube). There’s HDMI port to output movies on a bigger screen also. Still, don’t expect to run Video editing software or games on these mini laptops, but for everyday tasks, they’ll do just fine.

Gateway LT32

Having AMD inside does sacrifice battery life. The Acer AO 721 comes with a 6 Cell 4400 mAh battery and you’ll only going to squeeze around 5 hours out of it. The Gateway LT21 will probably pack the same one.

Now, for the difference. Acer sells the 721 for $429 right now in the States, with Free Shipping included. A fair price i could say. However, Gateway announced a starting price of $449 for the LT32. It’s not much of a difference, but since these devices are the same, what’s the point? Still, the Gateway is not yet available in stores, so hopefully they’ll come to their senses by the time it will.

All in all, both these machines are good picks. You do have alternatives though, like the HP Pavilion DM1z (also with Intel) or the Toshiba Satellite 210 (with ULV Intel and for sure better keyboard/trackpad, but a little bit more expensive). So better check out all your options before reaching any decision.

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Tags: 11.6" netbooks, Acer, AMD, AMD Nile, Gateway netbooks

Last updated: October 1, 2011 | Published: July 8th, 2010 | Add the first comment!