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Acer Aspire One Specification

The design of the Acer Aspire One is very sleek with softly rounded edges and a smooth glossy surface that is comfortable to hold when closed. The look is fairly basic, but it does have a few chrome accents here and there which add a bit of spice into the look of the netbook. Glossy plastic is found on the top of the screen cover, as well as around the entire LCD. At times the reflective boarder does get on your nerves if you are in a brightly lit room with many sources of glare.

Build quality looks solid for a subnotebook and the construction feels strong enough to handle being tossed around inside a bookbag without much concern for its safety (well apart from the glossy surfaces). Holding it while it is folded in half is similar to holding a hard cover book, having a good amount of rigidity to resist flex and compression. The screen cover feels especially strong, which is important for protecting the relatively fragile LCD panel.

From an upgrading perspective, the Acer Aspire One is a very difficult netbook to make enhancements to. The case does not separate as easily as others to access vital components like RAM or the hard drive. While most users won't touch the insides, it is worth mentioning it for those thinking about upgrading to Vista which enjoys additional RAM, or something looking to install a faster drive. Another disappointing aspect about the Aspire One is the open Mini-PCIe slot which is lacking any connector. This area is prepped with a SIM-card port for obvious 3G features, but unless you can solder on your own connector you are out of luck.

Keyboard and Touchpad
The keyboard is spacious as far as netbooks go, since the Aspire One is a 9" netbook inside the body of a 10" model. You have the slight disadvantage of having huge screen borders, but you get some much needed keyboard real estate. The keyboard is cramped compared to a fullsize notebook, but is easy to get the hang of with enough practice. The typing surface feels strong with no keyboard flex and individual keys feel strong with no wobble. One aspect that I really enjoy about the keyboard layout is the dedicated page up and page down buttons. For scrolling through long webpages, especially with mini touchpads, page up and page down keys can provide a more accurate way of navigating a webpage or document at a fast pace.
The touchpad design is slightly unique compared to other netbooks and notebooks in general, with the buttons on each side of the touch surface. The only other notebook we have seen with this layout is the HP Mini-Note 2133. The layout is a bit tricky to get used to, as you click on the hard palmrest surface, and try to scroll on the touchpad button. The surface is easily to slide your finger on and the sensitivity easily tracks your finger with light pressure. If you are able to get used to the touchpad button layout ends up not being that bad at all.

Display
The LED backlit display on the Acer Aspire One is very bright and vibrant. The white levels are very clear, leaning towards the cooler or bluer side. Colors look excellent with the glossy screen, but at the cost of increasing screen reflections and glare. The screen might be bright enough to view outside, but with all the bright reflective surfaces outside, the screen is nearly impossible to view comfortably. Viewing angles are better than average, with a broad sweet spot. Horizontal viewing angles are excellent, to the point where you could be looking almost perpendicular to the screen and still see accurate color. Vertical viewing angles are good, but they do find their limit at +/- 15 degrees forward or back.

Performance
This Intel Atom based netbook won't be breaking any speed records, but it performed more than adequately for normal activities. Internet browsing, word processing, and even photo editing tasks were handed in a very snappy environment. The most surprising thing from a reviewing standpoint was this subnotebook giving benchmark results in every program we could throw at it. This is not par for the course though, as many other netbooks have limited resolutions or other odd quirks that prevent most of the standard benchmarking programs to give valid results.