Acer Aspire One 522 review

Acer's Aspire One 522 netbook is based on AMD's C-Series Fusion processor line, which integrates a graphics accelerator on the same chip as its application processor cores. Sadly, the end result is a me-too system with little to make it stand out from the many other netbooks on the market.

Announced in January at the same time as AMD's Fusion chips, the 522 is one of many Acer netbook models available, although it is oddly not listed on Acer's own web site. However, it can be purchased from various Acer resellers including Amazon, Laptops Direct and SimplyAcer.

The 522 has the fairly typical netbook specifications of a 10.1in screen, 1GB memory, weight of just over a kilogram, a relatively low-powered processor, and Windows 7 Starter edition.

In this case, the processor is an AMD C-50 clocked at 1GHz, which boasts twin CPU cores and an on-chip integrated AMD Radeon HD 6250 GPU.

However, while the integrated GPU should give a boost to graphics performance, we did not find the Aspire One 522's video handling to be particularly impressive, which relegates the system to the status of just another netbook.

This Aspire also seems somewhat sluggish, despite its dual processor cores. It's slow to start up and takes its time switching between open windows. Battery life was also short on our review sample, due to a small three-cell battery pack.

That said, the Aspire One 522 is similar in design to the Aspire One 533 that V3.co.uk tested last year which was praised for its decent keyboard and overall build quality, and these points still stand.

As a netbook, this model is perfectly suitable for web browsing and editing documents, and does offer adequate playback of audio and video content from the internet, but this is pretty much in line with what you would expect from any other netbook model.

The Aspire One 522 is available in black or green casing styles, and is a typical size for a netbook, with a footprint of 25.8 x 18.5cm and 2.5cm, while our review sample weighed in at about 1.1kg.

It sports a decent array of I/O connections, with an Ethernet port, USB port and audio jack sockets on the right hand side of the case. There's also a reader for SD, Memory Stick Pro and xD Flash memory cards.

The left side has two further USB ports plus VGA and HDMI video outputs, the latter allowing the system to display full 1080p on an external monitor, according to Acer.

Naturally, the Aspire One 522 also includes wireless capability, in the shape of 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi, with Bluetooth and optional 3G.