Acer Aspire One netbook computer

Acer’s Aspire One oozes the build quality and attention to detail that you find throughout the Acer range of notebooks. It also has a few tricks up its sleeve.

The high-gloss finish is available in five colours (blue, white, golden brown or pink), but not black.

Whichever colour you choose you will find it susceptible to fingerprints and other marks, but that’s no different from any other gloss-finish notebook you care to mention.

It uses an Intel Atom N270 processor clocked at 1.6GHz with 512MB of onboard PC2-5300 DDR2 memory. There is also a Dimm slot that supports up to 1GB of Ram, giving the Aspire One a maximum memory capacity of 1.5GB.

It comes with two card slots, one of which is labelled Storage Expansion. By using Acer’s X System Management utility, you can slip in an SD card and it will be added to the system’s overall storage capacity of 120GB provided by a standard 2.5in Hitachi drive.

Two SD slots is a neat idea, allowing you to take, for example, the card from your camera and view photos stored on it without removing the card you are using for storage.

The 8.9in screen has a native resolution of 1,024x600 and features Acer’s Crystalbrite gloss coating, which produces crisp text and good sharp colours.

As expected, both wired and wireless networking is supported; 10/100Mbits/sec for the former, 802.11b/g for the latter. However, sitting behind the 2,200mAh three-cell battery (a six-cell version is also available), you’ll also find an upgrade slot which will be used in upcoming 3G-enabled versions of the Aspire One. Acer backs its netbook with its one-year International Travellers warranty.