Acer One Mini Notebook Views

Electronics

Asus, watch your back. You've been coasting for a while on the Eee PC. Oh, sure, it's cheap and tiny, but you've got serious competition waiting in the wings. Acer provided us with a preview (preproduction) unit of the upcoming Aspire One, which may be priced as low as $400; and after kicking the tires for about a week, I'm ready to shed my high-end portable in favor ofa sub-$500 netbook (as some people call thisclass of basic mini-notebook).

Today Acer has dropped the gauntlet on the mini-notebook battlefield. Introducing the Aspire one, which joins the ranks of the MSI Wind as one of the most powerful mini-notebooks yet, thanks to its blazing Intel Atom processor. Acer offers configurations with up to 1.5GB of memory and your choice of an 8GB flash drive or an 80GB hard drive into a 2.2-pound system with an 8.9-inch LED-backlit display.

I've now tried five of the new mini-notebooks, and the Acer Aspire One is one of the best. It offers good quality at a low price. But the Linpus Linux Lite version 0.5 that came preinstalled almost drove me batty, so I'd go for Windows XP instead. The Aspire One is very similar to the Asus PC Eee 900, with its 8.9in screen, but the case is almost an inch wider. This is enough to transform the keyboard from being very hard to use to one big enough for fast touch-typing - though it's quite not as good as the one on HP Mini-Note.

At 10.2 x 8.0 x 1.3 inches, the 10.1-inch Aspire One is longer and wider than the original but falls in the same size range as the other 10-inch netbooks on the market. When stacked up with the 10-inch Eee PC 1000HE, a slightly chunkier mini-notebook, the Aspire One was thinner and noticeably more compact.