Give us your ratings of the current mobile operating systems in order, and if you like feel free to add your reasons why you like or dislike them.

For me, it is 1) Symbian (S60 or UIQ) 2) Palm OS 3) iPhone 4) Windows Mobile 5) Blackberry

The ASUS Eee PC took the world by storm last year and showed that it is possible to build an affordable laptop style device which combines functionality with portability for a couple of hundred pounds. ASUS has recently updated the Eee line, but at a cost which puts it in the same price range as a budget laptop. I loved the Eee PC for a couple of months, but soon found myself less than overjoyed by the small screen and keyboard which both hampered the Eee for serious use. Within a short period of time it ended up back in it's box and subsequently on eBay and was never seen again. I then purchased a full Acer laptop which also found itself back in it's box quite quickly- it was a brilliant piece of kit, but one which was too expensive for my needs. All I need to do with a laptop is write freelance articles and reviews for 247 plus some basic browsing and email collection, so then time came to look at something simpler again. Myself and Neil met up for a coffee one day and I duly spotted the Acer Aspire One in a local electronics retailer- it was priced at only £249 and with a specification including an 8.9 inch TFT bright screen, 512MB of RAM and 8GB of flash memory it looked like good value. Neil spent some time inputting Linux commands to see what exact version of the OS it ran, which caused some concerned looks from the sales assistant whom I presume thought he was hacking into their network. After some time Neil confirmed what version of Linux it was running, I had no clue what he was talking about so bought it anyway.

In The Box

In the very cute and small box you get an AC adaptor, a recovery DVD and a user manual. Not exactly a prolific set of accessories, but they do the job. I have nothing else to say about the extra bits because they are as uninspiring as could be.

First Impressions

This review is actually my first impression of the Aspire One and the keyboard and screen are proving to be a hit already. The screen is perfectly viewable in bright sunlight and the keyboard is also 'much' better than the Eee version. I only use two fingers to type with, despite writing for hours each day, and this style seems to suit the Aspire keyboard set up. Like the Eee, the initial keyboard set up bears no relation at all to the symbols on it but a quick change of settings and reset solved that particular issue. Once changed to UK English (is there really any other kind?:) all of the punctuation and symbols are set up exactly as you would expect on any standard keyboard. There is obviously no Windows key, but the 'home' key is in place for quick switching to the main menu set up. The main menu is very basic with a standard icon set up split into four groups-

CONNECT- Browser (Firefox), Messenger, Email, RSS Reader, Wikipedia, Google Maps, Hotmail

WORK- Writer, Spreadsheets, Presentations, Calendar, Contacts, Calculator, Notes- basically OpenOffice with some extra applications included.

FUN- Media Master, Photo Master, Games (Tetris, Bubble, Puck, LLK Game, SuperTux, Bubble Shooter, Butterfly, Bubble Snooker, Checkers, Mahjong, Volley Balley), Webcam, Paint. As you can see the majority of the games come from Absolutist, and a lot of these are demo titles.

FILES- My Documents, My Music, My Pictures, My Videos, My Downloads and My Files. These are really just shortcuts with My Files being the main file manager included.

All of the above leaves 3.7GB out of a total user memory of 6.4GB free, so you may wish to remove some programs that are of little use to you.

There is a SETTINGS button at the bottom which includes a couple of curiosities such as '3G/WiMax' which is a possible indication of future improvements to the system. There is no SIM card slot and obviously WiMax is not exactly available yet, so there must be a reason for this setting?

The screen resolution is 1024x600 pixels which makes for a pin sharp display, but may potentially cause some issues with video playback (more on that in part two) and there is a webcam situated just above the screen display which is handy, if not well specified.

All in all, my first two hours with the Aspire have been very positive and the battery is holding up quite well- down to 46% after 2 hours with Wi-Fi enabled which is way above the quoted 'up to 3 hours' battery life. The weight, form factor and general build quality are superb and better than the Eee in almost every respect. This feels like a mini laptop from a hardware perspective and the inclusion of Linux is the only giveaway that it is not a fully fledged Windows unit.

The Atom processor should be slow for some tasks, and despite not being a powerhouse it has so far powered everything along quite nicely. It could be quicker considering the efficiency of the software on board, but this is not a device where speed is of major importance- if it is powerful enough to playback movies and the demands of other multimedia activities I will be more than impressed.

Tomorrow I will look at the multimedia capabilities of the Aspire One and should have some more conclusions regarding battery, general performance and how practical this mini laptop really is...

Clove has some new Aspire One's coming soon with much better specifications than this one, but at the same price.

Have you got talent? Are you passionate about your PDA and have the ability to communicate in a clear and concise fashion?

If you can answer yes to the above questions we would like to hear from you. We are looking for 'good' people to write news articles for the 247 sites.

It doesn't matter what devce you own. If it can be classed as a PDA / Smart mobile device we want to hear from you. If you visit every day and want to contribute and make yourself heard let us know by emailing shaun (at) mailstm.co.uk. There are some good perks to being involved.

Seven Days of Holiday, Seven Lessons is another good piece from Steve Litchfield over at AAS. All I learnt on my holidy was that my mobile operator is completely rubbish!

"It's a fairly well known fact that, for all the writing I do about mobility, I work from home and so don't always appreciate some of the real world tips and gotchas until I embark on a business trip or holiday. But 'en vacances' I've been and I here present seven things I've learned over the last seven days - for your interest and (hopefully) education, should you also be heading out to pastures new in the remainder of the holiday season...

1. Watch out for battery drain caused by maintaining a difficult data connection
It's a documented fact that being in an area of poor 3G reception can cause battery drain while the phone ramps up power and connection attempts, trying to keep that elusive '3G' icon lit up. I don't normally worry about this much, partly because I don't travel that much and partly because I've usually got battery power to spare (N95 8GB, E90, 6650, etc) But what I learnt this week is that this issue is magnified if you're keeping a data connection alive as well.

I was browsing AAS Mobile with a more or less full battery and then headed into an indoor tourist attraction without 'disconnecting'. An hour of gazing at sea horses and sharks later, I noticed my phone was getting quite warm - always a bad sign - and that the device had been trying and trying to keep the data connection going despite the (apparently) lead lined walls of the building. Result:- battery power was down to much less than half. In an hour. I had taken half a dozen photos, it's true, but the poor data 'reception' had really taken a huge toll on my battery.

Moral of the tale? Close Web down before heading into areas of known poor network reception..."

Does anybody really know what smartphone market share is? is new at Mobile Opportunity- "The source is Nielsen Mobile, formerly Telephia. The interesting thing about them is that they do much of the service quality monitoring for the operators, so they have much more direct access to mobile usage information than folks like IDC and Canalys, the people usually quoted for smartphone share.

Wired was focused on Palm's loss of market share, which is indeed striking (but not exactly news). But take a look at the chart again; there are a couple of other items that I think are more newsworthy.

The first surprise is that Nielsen shows Apple in fourth place in smartphone share. That's wildly different from what Canalys, the source usually reported, has been saying (link). Here's how they compare for Q4 2007..."