In most industries there's a long and sordid history of manufacturers giving cars, motorcycles, computers, and just about any other consumer product a little something
extra to make sure they perform well for the media. Asus seemingly got caught
doing just that to its Eee PC 900 last year, installing batteries with additional oomph for reviewers, and now we seemingly have a case of Acer following its competition's tracks straight into a bad PR situation, saying that it "inadvertently" shipped the first batch of 10-inch Aspire One netbooks (the ones sent to reviewers) with six-cell batteries rated at 5800mAh. Most consumers, however, will receive packs rated at just 4400mAh, which should shave two or three hours from its overall battery life. Those who've pre-ordered may get lucky and get the larger batt, but, like some lithium-laced Cracker Jack box, there's no way to tell what's inside until you open the package and have a look-see. Best of luck.
posted February 9th 2009 2:36PM
That 1000HE is looking good :)
LMFAO! All these other 10-inch laptops don't even match the capacity of the 6-cell 1000H 6600mAh battery :)
Bastards...
Did you expect anything different from one of the worst laptop brands there is?
This just made me cancel my preorder.
Screw this. I'm not touching ASUS if they can't just give straight review units.
I like what HardOCP does (or did. not sure if they still do it), where they actually buy one on the market and review it.
Um you want to read that again, the story is about Acer, with 1 mention about Asus.
Wow, what a fail. Try again.
Whoops, good point. Thanks for the en masse error catch.
Asus also did this in the past, anyway.
That's disgusting. It's one thing if it's purely a crapshoot for everyone, but specifically review units? That's practically fraud.
I'm getting sick of all of this bait and switch BS going on with reviewers being given above consumer-spec'd systems to work up reviews on. It seems like these companies are deliberately attempting to generate better reviews for their products than are warranted...
I for one am shocked, SHOCKED that companies would try to generate positive reviews through corrupt means.
[/sarcasm]
This is how class action lawsuits are started.... tsk tsk. You would think by now companies would follow some form of code of conduct or a set standard to go by.
How do you mistakenly send a batch of higher capacity batteries to the reviewers??? You're mass producing 4400mAh batteries and yet somehow sent over 5500mAh that magicly appeared? Pure bs....
5800*
They should make "Reviewer Battery" as one of the upgrade options on the order page.
I apologize for the crummy English in that comment.
..."make it as one of the options"? Geez, what's wrong with me?
I'm one of the writers from LAPTOP who posted that article and, while it's obvious that Acer made a mistake, I don't think it was their intent to mislead us. Why do I say that? Because they told us about the mistake with the battery and because they also are selling the system (who knows how many of the systems) with that 5800-mAH battery. If they were trying to fool consumers, they wouldn't have told us about the difference in battery capacities and would have let us publish the wrong battery type in our review. Now, that would be fooling people.
I think this is an honest mistake, based on a change in parts during production.
mistake? maybe.
Results: the already out reviews all say "awesome battery life" without the "mark mcguire" * of:
*this item may have a significantly more expensive battery than what you think you are getting... ?
um, yeah
damage done
Oh, hello there. I'm the Queen of England, nice to meet you.
*Specification are subject to change without notice....
ummm this has lawsuits written all over it
This is pathetic. These bottom of the heap junk brands (Asus, Acer, etc...) just can't help stabbing themselves in the back can they?
But if you really want to be pissed off consider the mainstream reviewers reaction to getting punked like this: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2340596,00.asp (see the editors note after the battery paragraph) The people at PC Mag aren't idiots, they know they were screwed over by being given a juiced up unit to review. But they're in such desperate shape they don't dare admit it for fear of losing yet another advertiser. Clearly PC Mag is resigned to being Asus' b***h.
Oops, I realize I mixed up the names Asus/Acer at the end there. I'm only posting this correction to keep the nitpickers at bay. Clearly these companies are pretty much the same.
Asus = junk brand?
umm.... ever had a good motherboard? a really good one? chances are it was Acer......
Just because they produce a less expensive product does not mean that they as a brand are a junk brand.
**just because you in your infinite wisdom have not heard of a brand, does not designate it as junk
yay, mixed em up myself.... should read....
".... chances are it was Asus"
You flamebait. Hurry up and justify the fact you just lumped in Asus with Acer, and cited evidence that Acer's fail rate is greater than say Dell or HP's.
I wouldn't say Asus is a junk brand, but personally I've had much better luck with Giga-byte motherboards.
I had a top-of-the-line xTH incarnation asus mobo, but it clearly had issues with the PCI implementation and they just trusted that the public would be too naive to notice and the reviewers too pleased by gifts to 'nitpick' about it, but yeah that is still an A brand, because they all do it and that's not taken into account when labelling companies A it seems.
(Had the same experiences with other mayor brands so don't take this as some advice to avoid asus)
Just "eBayed" an Acre Aspire One 5200(?) the larger one) battery for about 60.00. Supposed to deliver around 6 hours of life!! Whoot!
Is the 4400mAh still a 6-cell?
Phenom; LOL!! (seriously, I did laugh out loud). I'm not saying their products are bad. I'm saying their BRAND is bad... and getting worse. If you had said "not hearing of a product does not designate it as junk" you would have been accurate. Applying that same logic to a BRAND however is ludicrous... which as your followup post demonstrates perfectly :D The Acer BRAND is junk. Moves like this will just continue to hurt the brand's public perception.
After all; public perception is all a brand is.
And this public is that bad huh?
Study #1 (2004): Acer is "average"
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=9035
PC Magazine (2006): "Acer's overall score is average"
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2006499,00.asp
Show me that "Acer=junk" is not just your personal opinion but that the population of laptop buyers thinks that Acer is crap.
You're an odd duck Ypo... you've clearly spent a lot of time building an argument against a point I never made. I have no idea whether Acer's products are good or bad, that isn't what my post is about. It's about BRAND, and obvious media manipulation. Clearly there are quality brands like: Apple, Thinkpad/Lenovo, and Sony. i.e. brands that most people recognize - and perhaps value. There are also junk brands like: Asus, Acer, and MSI. These names are almost meaningless, their products are sold purely on price, specs, and maybe reviews... which brings us back to my first post. :D
Oh, and I'm not going to research Acer's brand statistics. You know why? BECAUSE THIS IS A COMMENT THREAD ON AN OLD GADGET BLOG POST! Yeesh, :D
An easy fix is to look at the name above posts and just skip over joshua's I find, although admittedly I forgot this time.
Acer has a reputation. And this is how this reputation was built.
How elegantly simple, and yet potently accurate
pcmag.com says "8 hours 46 minutes of battery life, when netbooks with similar battery capacities are getting around 6 hours and change." Scale that down by 4400/5800 and you've got 6 hours 39 minutes, which is still excellent. For those above saying the Asus 1000HE has a higher watt-hour battery: true, but it gets a shorter run time on it, so advantage to Acer in this case.
I think for acer aspire one battery the lighter the better .
As the acer aspire one is a Eee pc not a traditional notebook. Its weight is light.
I search the aspire one battery with Google, but all most are 9cells 6600mAh or 6 Cell 5200-5800mAh it is too heavy
In the end I found 6-cell battery here : http://www.laptops-battery.co.uk/acer-aspire-one-battery.htm
You can see some info about it