The current trend in miniature notebooks was started by the Asus Eee, but since then there's been others like HP, Dell, HCL, MSllaunching Netbooks and now the Acer AspireOne. The latter stands out from the crowd because it's one of the cheapest. The original Eee had a tiny screen while the 9in Acer Aspire One we review here clocks. Almost the cheapest, it beats all its 9in competitors in some ways.

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

Along the two sides are sockets three USB network, monitor, headphone, microphone and memory card readers. The card reader on the right side works as normal, 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. This one comes with a 120GB hard disk drive.



The slim battery has a relatively low capacity, so despite some useful power-saving tricks, the On, doesn't last long on a charge. Without wireless networking, it ral out after two-and-a-quarter hours in our tests, which is far lower than the MSI Wind, for instance. Regular travellers will have to buy a larger' cell battery. On the connectivity front, the notebook comes with wireless LAN but importantly misses out on Bluetooth.The netbook also comes integrated wil a webcam, making video conferences a breeze.

The keyboard is much better it's well-designed with larger keys that we quickly adjusted to The track pad has mouse buttons on eithE side, but function key can disable the touch pad entirely if it gets in the way when typing. Inside the One is a 1.6GHz Intel Atom processor and 1 GB of memory. It's happy running a few browser windows and a word processor at the same time,and is capable of playing DivX video files. A small, fairly quiet, fan cools the Pc Buyers have a choice to prefer th Linux or the Windows XP version, but this model uses Windows XP.