Acer Aspire One 522

The Acer Aspire One 522 is a 10.1 inch netbook with a 1280x720 pixel panel and an AMD Brazos Ontario APU (processor and graphics card together), the C-50.

Design and build: finish needs a second look

Although entirely in plastic, the Aspire One 522 has a sober and relatively elegant design. The finish could be improved but there are no major design faults. Note, the screen surround and hood pick up finger marks all too easily.


The keyboard offers comfortable and relatively quiet keying. The only issue we have is with the overly small arrow keys.

The multitouch touchpad is of good quality, precise and well-proportioned. Its coating gives a good glide and you don't need to keep jumping back to get the cursor across the other side of the screen.

The webcam is no model to follow. The image lacks sharpness and movements are blurred and slightly delayed. There's no variation in the blacks. Let's just say that it will serve as something to fall back on if necessary.

Connectivity covers all the bases. There are three USB 2.0 ports, an RJ45, the headphones and mic sockets and an SD card reader.

Its fan is inaudible at idle. During more demanding tasks it's not quite as quiet, but a film pretty much covers it. Temperatures stay under 37°C, which isn't bad but perhaps a little high, given the machine's capabilities.

Processing power: Disappointing!

A major disappointment. The processor part of the AMD C50 APU (processor index: 20) is lower than the Intel Atom N550 (processor index: 24). The Aspire One 522 is a netbook which can't really be relied on for much more than text processing and Internet browsing. Processing times for more demanding applications (video encoding, photo retouching and so on) are far too long.

High definition video playback (HD 1080p, Blu-ray equivalent) is no problem as long as you use playback software that supports the graphics hardware decoding (recent version of VLC, Media Player Classic HD as of version 1.5 or Power DVD as of version 9). Otherwise, the processor part can only handle up to 720p.

It takes 50 seconds to start up Windows 7 Starter and you'll need to wait another 5 to 10 seconds for the various background applications to start running (antivirus off). It turns off in twenty seconds.

Gaming: very limited capacity

Although its gaming capabilities are better than what you get with an integrated chipset, the graphics part of the C-50 APU (AMD Radeon HD 6250) won't do much for enthusiasts. The best you can hope for is to run the least demanding titles at minimum settings and low resolution. For anything else, even when you lower graphics settings to a minimum, fluidity just isn't there.

Audio: a single loud-speaker

You certainly won't be troubling your neighbours with this one! With just one loud speaker, which is moreover badly positioned and not very powerful, you won't want to rely on it for your music collection. Even a YouTube video may be hard to follow. The headphones out is just about ok, but nothing to write home about either.

Battery life: another disappointment!

Again, when it came to battery life, we were disappointed. 2h45 video playback isn't very good, especially when you compare it to other netbooks that give up to 9 hours under the same conditions (wi-fi deactivated, headphones plugged in and brightness at 100 cd/m²). Note that this battery test was carried out with a 3-cell battery and Acer tells us that some models will be sold with a 6-cell, which should improve things. As soon as we receive a version with this battery we'll carry out the test again. This machine is small (260 x 185 x 25 mm) and light (1.3 Kg), which means it can be easily transported in a rucksack or bag.