Weighing in at just over three pounds, the Aspire One 721 isn’t the lightest notebook of its size we’ve seen, and one reason for that is a six-cell, 4400-mAh battery that maintained power to the CPU for nearly 4.5 hours. It’s not often that Acer opts for style over substance, but the company did so in the 721’s case. It requires more strokes than normal to move the cursor up and down the screen. A slight stutter during quick background pans in a high-rate, 1080 video was the only (and barely) noticeable difference.Ī lack of front deck space also cramps the size and usage of the flush-mounted touchpad. Video, on the other hand, is as smooth in nearly all cases as on the 1830T–entirely watchable. Thanks to the HD 4225, the 721’s gaming rates are actually a frame or two faster than the TimelineX 1830T’s however, that’s a pyrrhic victory–19 frames per second in Unreal Tournament 3 is still unplayable. Subjectively, the unit feels fine except when loading larger apps, and then it feels laggy. Not many ATA SSDs–a favorite netbook/small laptop performance-boosting upgrade–are out there, so hot-rodders beware.Īs for the Aspire One 721’s performance: A WorldBench 6 score of 52 takes it out of the usual lousy netbook range, but bestows only laptop mediocrity. The 250GB drive that shipped with our 721-3574 test unit is an ATA version. The only (minor) gotcha with the 721 is the hard drive. The 721 is also outfitted with 2GB of DDR3 memory and, as a companion to the Neo CPU, with an ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4225 integrated GPU. The Aspire One 721 has a crisp, 1366-by-768, 11.6-inch color display, which is big enough to comfortably watch videos on without having to be unduly close to the screen. The WorldBench 6 performance numbers show a 21-point performance gap, but the subjective experience isn’t as dissimilar as that difference might lead you to believe.

The two units are outwardly identical, but the 721 substitutes a far cheaper AMD Athlon II Neo CPU for the 1830T’s Intel Core i5. If you’ve lusted after Acer’s TimelineX 1830T ultraportable but don’t have $700, you can get much the same experience from the company’s $430 (as of ) Aspire One 721 netbook.

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