Review: Acer Aspire One notebook computer

Miniature notebooks, which do all the jobs of full-sized ones but with slightly less power, seem to be the order of the day in 2008.

The trend was started by the Asus Eee, but since then there's been the Packard Bell Easynote XS, the HP Mininote, the MSI Wind and now the Acer Aspire One. The latter stands out in this crowded marketplace because it's one of the cheapest around, at £230.

The One looks smart, with a white case and shiny black bezel around the 9in 1,024x600 pixel screen. The screen isn’t particularly bright, but it is good enough for browsing online and for work. Acer has employed a lot of font smoothing, though, so text doesn’t appear as pin-sharp as it does on some others.

Along the two sides are sockets: three USB, network, monitor, headphone, microphone and memory card readers. The card reader on the right side works like a normal one, but the one on the left can be used to expand the computer's main storage: a memory card inserted there will add its capacity automatically to the main storage (instead of a hard disk it uses an 8GB memory chip).

The slim battery has a relatively low capacity, so despite some useful power-saving tricks, the One doesn't last long on a charge. Without wireless networking, it ran out after two and a quarter hours in our tests, which is far lower than the MSI Wind can do, for instance. Regular travellers will have to go for the larger £80 battery (which is not yet available).

The keyboard is much better – it's well-designed with larger keys that we quickly adjusted to. The trackpad has mouse buttons on either side, but a function key can disable the touch pad entirely if it gets in the way when typing.

Inside the One you’ll find a 1.6GHZ Intel Atom processor, 512MB of memory and the 8GB of storage. It's happy enough running a few browser windows and a word processor at the same time, and is capable of playing DivX video files. A small fan cools the system, but it’s quite quiet.

Windows XP Home will be available on more expensive Aspire One models, but this one uses the free Linux operating system with a selection of useful programs installed. We liked the ability to start both Firefox and Openoffice Writer from the front screen, and the email and instant messaging programs can cleverly connect to several services.

As yet, Acer has not confirmed when the Aspire One will be available, but it's expected to ship by August. When that happens, although the competition betters it in a few areas, at just £230 the One will be the best value mini notebook out there.

Vista compatible: No

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