The Aspire One is 24mm wider than the Eee PC 901 and while this is obviously a step in the wrong direction in terms of portability, it’s one we’re inclined to forgive. Why? Because it means Acer has been able to squeeze in a bigger keyboard that transforms the Aspire One from a device for emails and occasional notes into something that you can actually sit and type on for lengthy spells. The keys are still far from full-size, but the larger key tops and wider key spacing makes them much more comfortable to use, though it’s a pity Acer didn’t plump for a double-height Enter key too.

The touchpad has the same stretched design as the HP 2133 Mini-Note, with buttons at either side rather than below it. Fortunately, it works a great deal better than that on the Mini-Note – the narrow buttons have a far more positive feel and the sensitivity is properly set to match the horizontal and vertical dimensions.

Both the size and resolution of the Aspire One’s screen are the same as the Eee PC 901’s, and put side-by-side, there’s little difference in image quality. The Eee PC’s screen is a little brighter at its maximum setting, but the Aspire One’s LED backlight is far from lacking in luminance.

The Aspire One has a near-identical complement of ports to the Eee PC, with a couple of notable differences. The first is a second SD Card slot on one side of the case – pop a card in here and its free storage space is automatically added to that of the 8Gb SSD, much in the same way as you can create a JBOD RAID array in Windows.

Acer has also recognised that that a netbook designed for go-anywhere internet access isn’t much use without an internet connection and to that end, its Bluetooth and Wi-Fi will be complemented by onboard 3G on some models (but not the entry-level one) – there’s a SIM card slot underneath the battery – and at some point, WiMAX.

Although Windows XP will be available on the Aspire One later in the year, for now models are shipping with Linpus Linux Lite – a commercial distro based on Fedora. It’s a distro that’s designed specifically for small-screen netbooks and it uses a similar simplified front-end to the Xandros-based distro supplied with the Eee PC. The UI has been heavily modified, judging by the screenshots at the Linpus web site, though.

The Desktop is split into four categories – Connect, Work, Fun and Files – with a selection of appropriate applications in each. The applications are comprised of the usual open source suspects – OpenOffice.org, Firefox – plus a few apps that appear to be unique to Linpus Linux.

At the time of writing, we hadn’t figured out a way to switch the operating system from simple to advanced mode, though we suspect someone will figure it out before too long. You can access the full suite of Linpus Linux programs and utilities by right-clicking on the Desktop, but many of these didn’t do anything – something we’ll put down to this being a pre-production laptop rather than the features actually being disabled.

Since it runs Linux, we weren’t able to benchmark the Aspire One for performance, but we can safely presume that its Intel Atom N270 processor won’t perform any differently to that used in the Eee PC 901.

The Aspire One doesn’t offer a manual  underlock/overclock function, so there’s no way to lock the processor at its lowest 1200Mhz load/700Mhz idle clock speed to eke the most out of the battery. This is a little unfortunate, since the base Aspire One model is supplied with a mere three-cell, 2200mAh battery and this lasted for just two and a half hours in our light use test. And this is a best-case battery life test – we weren’t able to run an intensive use test, but you can bet that it would be around half this time.