So, Brooke and I both got new toys today. My cell phone died (again), so thankfully, I was due for a replacement via AT&T and I grabbed an LG Vu from Wal-Mart, as their deal on the phone was significantly better than AT&T.com and the AT&T stores. It’s a touch phone, so it’s quite a bit different than I’m used to…and, I’m going to need to get some kind of case for the thing, as I guarantee I’m going to drop this phone (and, subsequently, it will die).
The other fun new toy is actually Brooke’s. Her Compaq Presario laptop (a Celeron-based system with 256 MB of RAM) has been slowly dying, mostly in the form of a slowed start-up (even after reformatting) and a battery that won’t hold its charge. She decided to give a netbook a try, an Acer Aspire One. These are a relatively new class of ultra-portable laptops that typically use an Intel Atom processor, has a 10″ or smaller screen (hers is an 8.9″ glossy LCD), and no DVD drive. The latter will take some getting used to, but the smaller screen is something she thinks she can handle. You can see the size comparison with my 15″ Dell XPS M1530 above (and below in another view). This thing is also 2.2 lbs, which is less than half of what my laptop weighs!
Obviously, the keyboard is a bit smaller, as well. The other thing that we realized is that it is near impossible to install Office 2003 without a disc drive, so she downloaded and installed OpenOffice 3.0, and that seems to work alright. Overall, the laptop is quite responsive, but we’re mostly curious about how battery life will be on such a small machine.
Anyway, after Brooke has gotten to use the thing a bit more, maybe I’ll write more about it. So far, she seems pretty pleased with it, but to be fair, she only got to use it for a few hours before bed, and that entailed installing software…especially Firefox… It’s great that she complained about having to use IE at all, even when she was using it to go straight to the Firefox download page… š