The tiny 532h -2588 is an average netbook that apears to have compromised too much. It is a compact device that is, at best, suited for mundane office jobs and light web browsing. Its cheap price of 310 United States dollars (as at tenth june, 2010) betrays this fact. The machine comes with a limited display resolution and a below per keyboard touchpad.
The device features a windows 7 starter edition operating system and an installed memory of a minute 1 GB. It uses intel atom N450 CPU its processor speed is a pedestrian 1660MHz and a cashe size of 512 MB. The machine is stuffed with a five -in- one flash memory card reader to beef up its memory armour. Also embedded in the product are two audio ports, a 10/100 fast ethernet connection facility and a 160 giga byte drive. Its display tops 10.1 inches with a low resolution of 1024 -by- 600 which adversely affects its ability to undertake major tasks.
The 532h 2588 carries memory technology DDR2 SDRAM and a slow speed of 667MHz. Its storage capacity is 160 GB but a huge chunk, 30GB of it, is consumed by the restore partition. This is a further dent to its already depleted memory bank. Its hard drive speed can only stop the clock at 5400 RPM. The other storage facilities for this machine are the memory stick, the memory stick PRO, multimedia card, SD card, SDHC card and XD – picture card. Other interface connections are; bluetooth, microsoft software works 9 Ethernet( RJ45) and video( 15 pin High Density D -shell).
The device weighs a partly 2.7 pounds but the weight can be exagerated to 3.1 pounds when stuffed with accessories. Its width of 10.1 inches, depth of 7.3 inches and a height of 1.5 inches does not give an impression of a bulky operator. But the machine is quite responsive and is good in sharpness colour manouvers. It also offers good flash playback, for example, youtube. Its three USB ports make for easy expansion. When you are using a USB optical drive, the first two ports are used for power and data functions while the last one is mostly used for expansion. Two of the ports are on the left end, next to the VGA connector, while the other one is on the right end.
The product has too many drawbacks for comfort. The keyboard for starters is too compact which greatly affects its functionability and you need to apply much pressure to push the buttons. The starter edition is a big let -down, while the device cannot run a 3D game. Further, the device does not offer Broadcom Crystal HD accelerator or even the nVidia Ion chipset. These problems are further compounded by its low volume levels and a lack of a bass. Its score of 60 on the WorldBench 6 will flatter no one.
The acer 532h will appeal to those who engage in light tasks and web browsing, and also those who put cost before every thing else. For the rest of us we are likely to be disappointed by this machine that has weighty userbility issues.