Acer Aspire Revo Review

Final Thoughts

Reviewing the Revo has been a protracted process, as we’ve had to temper our respect for the technology inside with the underwhelming user experience it offers in real life. In comparison to existing netbooks, it’s clear that Ion offers an enormous performance increase. Full 1080p HD video playback and gaming are both now possible on an extremely small, low cost and power efficient PC.

These are tasks we wouldn't have dreamt of trying to perform on a standard Intel Atom system, but we have to question the resultant user experience. HD playback might be possible, but it’s a colossal pain to get working, and you have to jump between two separate applications to play files, and even then support for certain files is uncertain - you never know 100 per cent it's going to work until you try. It's enormously frustrating to sit down, wanting to play a movie, only to have to switch player apps, then fiddle with the filters just to get a file to play – it’s not a fluid or user friendly experience, so while the Revo can play HD video files, we wouldn't want to use it for this task on a regular basis.


It’s the same story with the Revo’s gaming performance – while it can play many modern games, a fantastic achievement for a such small device, the experience is so heavily degraded in most cases that we just wouldn't want to play the game in the first place, and it lacks the horsepower to play popular online titles like Team Fortress 2 or Counter Strike: Source at anywhere near playable frame rates, even at their very lowest graphics settings.

The sad fact is that Revo, while unlocking the extra functionality of an onboard GPU, don’t offer the quality user experience to make these new features really engaging. In fact, following extended use we’ve struggled to find an area in which we’d realistically want to use the Revo ourselves. As a media PC it’s flaky HD support makes it unattractive, as even an entry level gaming platform it’s under powered and as a desktop system the restrictions of the Atom 1.6GHz CPU mean that it’s only suited for the most basic of tasks. It’s a cornucopia of mediocrity that has lots of great new features but doesn’t do any of them well enough for them to be considered truly worthwhile.


What’s more, the Revo retails for £250, a good £20 more than a similarly 1.6GHz Atom powered Asus Eee PC and a comparable price to either of this generation’s high-end games consoles. For the same price you could also comfortably self build a mATX dual core system which won’t be limited by Atom’s limitations and will pack much more graphics horsepower, although this would of course consume much more power and not come in such a small and neat package.

The Revo is at least competitively priced against competing nettops such as the Eee Box, and the added inclusion of Ion does make it very attractive if space or power consumption are your top priorities. The decision to omit the Vesa mount from the retail box is also very frustrating, as the option to have the Revo hidden behind a display for some minimalist basic computing was perhaps one of the most attractive propositions of the product when it was first announced.

In the end then, the Revo is something of a disappointment. Limited by the 1.6GHz Atom CPU and Windows Vista Home Premium it’s a jack of all trades, but master of none and we struggle to think of a situation where it holds a real advantage over specifically targeted devices. Sure it's a much more capable all-round system, but the extra Ion features are more of a gimmick than something you'd really want to make use of on a daily basis. Better media playback software, GPU accelerated Flash and Windows 7's GPU features might change our minds, but for the moment, we're not convinced.

• Build Quality
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• -
• -
• -
• 7/10

• Features
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• -
• -
• -
• 7/10

• Ease of Use
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• -
• -
• -
• -
• 6/10

• Performance
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• -
• -
• -
• -
• 6/10

• Value
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• -
• -
• -
• 7/10

• Overall
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• -
• -
• -
• -
• 6/10

Score Guide