NetbookTech

Introduction

So when is a netbook not a netbook?

When it comes to the Acer Aspire 1410, it’s not an easy question to answer at all.

The system looks like a netbook, feels like a netbook, and it’s even priced like a netbook. Yet at the end of the day, by Intel’s definitions, the 1410 is in fact not a netbook but an “ultra thin notebook” (also commonly known in the industry as a “thin-and-light notebook”).

The Aspire 1410 takes the look and feel of an 11.6 inch netbook and combines it with the power and energy-efficiency of Intel Consumer Ultra-Low Voltage processors – in this case the Intel Core 2 Solo SU3500 processor.

At a higher level, the Aspire 1410 is best seen as a bridge between high-end netbook systems and high-end thin-and-light systems with more powerful dual-core processors and even larger form factors.

Overview and Features

At first glance, it’s easy to think the Aspire 1410 is just a rehash of the 11.6 inch Aspire One AO751h netbook. The two systems certainly look similar enough but once you get past the looks, you’ll notice the beauty inside the 1410, culminating with the use of the Intel CULV processor – the Intel Core 2 Solo SU3500.

Let’s start by taking a tour of the notebook on the outside.

The 1410 uses the same glossy finish/fingerprint magnet that we’ve grown accustomed to seeing across all of Acer’s Aspire product lineup and quick frankly, I’m just not a fan of it. I’d gladly trade up the glossy finish in favor of either a matte finish or a brushed metal finish (curiously enough, Acer does use a brushed finish on the inside palm rest of the notebook).

Looking at the system from the top (above), you’ll notice the Asprie 1410 is fairly simple, with rounded corners at the front of the system, and somewhat angled corners at the rear.

The left side of the notebook features (from left to right above) a VGA port, the AC power port, a vent, an HDMI connector, and a single USB 2.0 port.

On the right (going from left to right above), there’s a 5-in-1 media card reader (supporting MMC, SD, Memory Stick, Memory Stick PRO, and xD-Picture Card formats) , a headphone jack, a microphone input jack, two USB 2.0 ports, a Kensington lock slot, and a Gigabit Ethernet port.

Looking at the underside of the 1410, you’ll find the integrated speakers up towards the front, two panels for the hard drive and memory slots, and the battery towards the back. The battery sits flush with the rest of the system although there is a slight bulge near the rear to help elevate the notebook to a more comfortable typing position (and no doubt to accommodate the larger 6 cell battery).

Keyboard and Touchpad

The Aspire 1410 comes with a full-sized keyboard which many of you will recognize as practically identical to the Gateway LT3103u keyboard we reviewed earlier in the year. If you found the LT3103u comfortable to type on then you won’t have any problems with this keyboard at all.

Below are shots of the Gateway LT3103u (left) next to the Aspire 1410 (right).

Close-up of the Gateway LT3103u keyboard:

and a close-up of the Aspire 1410 keyboard:

The touchpad is a bit small for our tastes – especially when you consider the quality of the Gateway LT3103u touchpad or the enormous touchpad found on the smaller 10.1 inch Toshiba NB205 netbook.

The touchpad itself sits flush with the rest of the palm rest making it somewhat difficult to tell where the touchpad begins and ends. Yes, it’s multi-gesture enabled but don’t you think that feature would benefit from a larger touchpad? We think so.

The touchpad buttons are adequate although they lack a tactile feel that some of you (including myself) may desire.

Display

One of the main attractions of the Aspire 1410 is the 11.6 inch LED backlit display featuring a beautiful resolution of 1366 x 768. Those of you used to working with smaller 10+ inch netbook displays with the near-standard 1024 x 600 resolution will truly appreciate the larger display and resolution of the 1410.

As a person who spends a great time of time writing, coding, and reading, the larger display is simply a boon for me. I spend less time scrolling through windows and web pages; I’m actually able to place some windows side by side for comparison purposes; some Windows menus which used to run off the display now actually fit in this one; and most importantly, I can finally view 720p video in all its glory (more on video performance later on).

About the only quibble I might have with the display is the glossy surface which can easily reflect light sources directed straight at it. Ambient light and light sources to the side pose no problems with the display.

You’ll find the built-in VGA webcam at the top of the display with a microphone to the left of the webcam. The camera system is optimized for low-light conditions making it entirely usable in a wide variety of environmental conditions.

Ports

As you saw earlier, the 1410 comes with three USB 2.0 ports, a VGA port, and an HDMI port making it incredibly easy to hook this machine up to a flat panel display.

The Hardware Inside

Now on the inside, the Acer Aspire 1410 is a Centrino-based platform with the Intel Core 2 Solo Processor SU3500 at the heart of the machine. Built on a 45nm process, the SU3500 is clocked at 1.4GHz, features a 3 MB L2 cache, a 800MHz Front-Side Bus, and support for a 64 bit instruction set (which means you can conceivably install 64 bit Windows on this machine). One of the key features of the SU3500 is the low TDP of 5.5 watts which keeps the system cool, reduces the need for loud fans, and of course reduces overall power consumption of the system allowing for longer battery lives.

On the graphics side, the 1410 comes with the Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 4500MHD. The chipset is a nice improvement over the GMA 950 chipset found in many of today’s netbooks but it’s still no NVIDIA ION platform.

Storage and memory wise, the reviewed system comes with 2GB of RAM (plenty for Windows Vista), and an ample 250GB 5400RPM SATA hard drive. It’s easy to upgrade both components through panels located on the underside of the 1410.

Software

At the software level, this system came with Windows Vista Home Premium as well as a free upgrade to Windows 7. Current iterations of the Aspire 1410 come with Windows 7 Home Premium.

You’ll also find several ASUS utilities, A LOT OF GAMES, and some bloatware installed on the 1410. Curious what this all looks like? Check out the stills I took of the uninstall programs section of Windows Vista:

Physical Comparisons

Because I know some of you like to see what systems look like next to one another, here are side by side physical comparisons of the Aspire 1410 with the Toshiba NB205 and the Lenovo S10.

First up – here are shots of the 1410 with the Toshiba NB205. You’ll notice the extended battery of the NB205 actually makes the entire system deeper than the Aspire 1410.

Next is the 1410 compared against the Lenovo S10. The 1410 is just a tad bit larger than the S10.

Finally, here’s the Aspire 1410 next to its cousin, the Gateway LT3103u.

Performance

Despite being lower-clocked and a single-core processor, the Intel Core 2 Solo SU3500 offers a solid improvement in terms of performance over the Intel Atom N270 and Atom N280 processor. The following benchmarks cover processor, system, and graphics performance compared against the following netbooks:

• Acer Aspire One AOA150
  • Intel Atom N270 processor clocked at 1.6GHz
  • 8.9 inch display
  • 1GB of RAM
  • 120GB hard drive
  • Windows XP Home
• Gateway LT3103u
  • AMD Athlon 64 L110 processor clocked at 1.2 GHz
  • 11.6 inch display
  • 2GB of RAM
  • 250GB HDD
  • Benchmarks for both Windows XP Professional and Windows Vista Home Basic 32 bit
• Toshiba NB205
  • Intel Atom N280 processor clocked at 1.66GHz
  • 10.1 inch display
  • 1GB of RAM
  • 160GB HDD
  • Windows XP Home

Processor and System Performance

Sandra Processor Arithmetic

The Aspire 1410 achieves an approximate 50 percent performance increase over the Atom N280/N270 equivalent systems as well as the Athlon 64 L110 processor-based Gateway system.

Sandra Processor Multimedia

The Aspire 1410 delivers a roughly 50+ percent integer performance gain over comparable netbook systems although floating point performance remains in-sync with the same systems.

Sandra Cryptography

We see an improvement of roughly 30 to 60 % for the Sandra Cryptography benchmark in the Acer Aspire 1410.

Sandra File System

The built-in 250GB 5400RPM SATA hard drive of the Aspire 1410 performs slightly worse than comparable netbooks and trails the Gateway LT3103u hard drive by approximately 40 percent.

Sandra Memory Bandwidth

The Aspire 1410 has a 20+ percent improvement in memory bandwidth.

Sandra Memory Latency

PC Mark 2005

PC Mark 2005 verifies practically everything we’ve been seeing thus far with the Sandra benchmarks. The 1410’s Core 2 Solo processor delivers 40 – 50 % in processor improvements, higher scores, and improved graphics performance. The hard drive performance is in line with other netbooks except for the Gateway LT3103u.

POV-Ray

For the POV-Ray benchmark, we don’t have numbers for the Gateway netbook handy but we do have the other Atom-based netbooks here and again, the 1410 trounces the performance of the Atom-based systems upwards to 3X the performance.

Geekbench

Again – we’re lacking numbers for the Gateway system but we see the same story with the 1410’s performance increases over Atom-based netbooks.

Futuremark Peacekeeper

Peacekeeper measures browser performance and again we see another winner for the Aspire 1410 with up to 2x in performance for both Firefox and IE8.

Graphics Performance

3D Mark 2006

3D Mark 2006 reveals the Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 4500MHD outperforms both the Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 950 on the Acer Aspire One AOA150 and Toshiba NB205 as well as the ATI Radeon X1270 integrated graphics of the Gateway LT3103u by upwards of over 300 percent. Does this translate well in terms of video performance? More on that in a second.

Cinebench R10

Cinebench confirms the performance increases of the 1410 (note there’s no multi-cpu benchmark score for both the Gateway LT3103u and the Aspire 1410 since these are single-core machines).

Video Performance

Unfortunately the increased performance of the Aspire 1410 doesn’t necessarily translate to flawless video playback performance. The single-core Core 2 Solo SU3500 processor coupled with the Intel GMA4500MHD is powerful enough to handle standard definition and 720p HD video but fails at playing back 1080p resolution materials reliably.

Our 720p video testing involved several file formats – everything from DivX encoded files to WMV files to MPEG-4 files – and everything played back flawlessly with CPU utilization hovering around 60-80 percent depending upon the encoding.

Here’s a snapshot of H.264 720p video playback:

and a snapshot of WMV 720p video playback:

Things change when it comes to 1080p video. An attempt at playing back Transformers 2 at 1080p (ripped directly from a Blu-ray disc) resulted in choppy playback and 100% CPU utilization. 1080p WMV files were also a struggle with the 1410 (see the still below for a look at the CPU utilization).

Interestingly enough, the only 1080p file that played back flawlessly was a DivX encoded file (see below).

On the Adobe Flash video side of the equation, HD video clips from both YouTube and Hulu played back flawlessly even though CPU utilization hovered around 90 percent (and this was with Adobe Flash Beta 10.1).

NOTE: It should be noted that this was all tested under Windows Vista Home Premium. We’ve heard that things improve under Windows 7 so we’ll be sure to give that OS a try shortly and update the review accordingly.

Battery Life

Although rated at 6 hours, the 6 cell 4400mAh Lithium-Ion battery achieved approximately 5 hours of battery life in our informal testing. Although this is enough for most of a country-country flight, it’s somewhat disappointing when you consider competing netbooks and thin-and-light notebooks are achieving 8-10 hours of battery life. We just wish Acer bundled a higher-capacity battery with the 1410.

Summary

When all is said and done, 2009 will be known for two important trends – the maturation of the netbook market and the introduction of the thin-and-light notebook market.

The Aspire 1410 is a blend of both markets – offering the price and compact form factor of an 11.6 inch netbook with the performance expected out of a low-end thin-and-light notebook. 

Don’t be mistaken – the Aspire 1410 isn’t for everyone. The 1410 is ideal for people who are:

• Looking for higher performance than Atom-based alternatives and not looking to spend more than $450 dollars.
• Looking for a larger display than your typical 10+ inch netbook and gaming/high-performance video isn’t important.
• Looking to handle basic everyday computing tasks and are happy with 5 hours of battery life

On the flip side, the 1410 isn’t necessarily ideal for people who are:

• Looking for that perfect high definition 1080p video playback system
• Looking for day-long battery life
• Looking for graphics performance

At the end of the day, the Aspire 1410 is an excellent example of what a thin-and-light notebook can be. It provides competitive pressure to the low-end netbook market while delivering a balanced mix of price and performance to the consumer looking for solid value in this marketplace.

Pros

• Performance improvement over netbooks of comparable price range
• Nice keyboard
• Reasonably priced

Cons

• Battery life is a bit weak compared to competition
• Glossy surface is a fingerprint magnet
• Small touchpad

Specifications

The Aspire 1410 reviewed in this article has the following specifications (the model is Acer Aspire 1410-8414):

• Intel Core 2 Solo processor SU3500 clocked at 1.4GHz with 800MHz Front Side Bus
• 11.6 inch Acer LED 1366 x 768 resolution display
• Intel GMA 4500MHD graphics
• Intel GS45 Express Chipset
• 2GB of RAM
• 250GB hard drive
• Multi-in-1 media card reader
• Acer Nplify 802.11a/b/g/Draft-n Wi-Fi
• Acer CrystalEye Webcam
• Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR
• Gigabit Ethernet
• HD audio support
• 6 cell lithium ion battery