Acer Aspire One Netbook: Great Value, Great Performance

The bright and vibrant 10.1" display operates at a default, maximum resolution of 1024 x 768. Colors are vibrant and blacks are pretty good as well. The display is very responsive with no indications of screen lags, blurring, or any other negatives. The Acer Aspire One I reviewed did not have any visible dead pixels, and I have not read about problems in that area.

• Screen Size: 10.1"
• Widescreen: Yes
• Max Resolution: 1024x600

With so many similarities between netbooks, the keyboard layout is one of the most important things to evaluate. All netbooks have to cut corners somewhere to keep size down, and this means there is usually something missing from the keyboard. Acer is one of the best in this area, as they seem to fit everything important into the keyboard.

Of particular note:

• Full size enter key - I find a small enter key to be one of the most disastrous things you can do to a keyboard. If you have trouble hitting enter, you will have trouble with virtually every task that involves the keyboard.

• Full size shift key on both the left and right sides of the keyboard

• Full set of independent cursor keys - Some netbooks combine the cursor arrow keys with other important keys. The Acer Aspire One combines them with screen and volume controls (rarely used) and home and end. I personally use home and end quite a bit, but I am aware that they are not widely used keys. It is an interesting point of computer lore that Steve Jobs famously wanted to leave off the cursor arrow keys from the Macintosh. He felt the mouse could do it all. Feedback was enormously negative so he put them back. Never underestimate the degree to which end users like their cursor arrow keys!

• Independent function keys - I really like the fact that you get independent function keys that are the default behavior for those keys. I dislike having to turn on a "function lock" to turn number or other keys into my function keys.

• Independent INSERT and DELETE. While not widely utilized, these are very handy keys to have on their own rather than operating by also holding down a "Fn" key.

• Full size, well located [ { } ] | \ keys. For programmers, these keys are extremely vital (especially { and } ). I am very glad they kept programmers in mind when laying out the keyboard.

• Textured windows key - there is a textured windows logo on the windows key that helps you avoid it when you want ctrl, alt, or the Fn key. Further, if you really want the Windows key, it is easy to find. Early beta reports on Windows 7 indicate that the windows key is utilized in a lot of new, handy keyboard shortcuts. It would appear Acer has the head start on making it convenient to use them.