Acer Aspire One 751h

In many ways, the Acer Aspire One 751h, the company’s first 11.6-inch netbook, is an improvement over its recently refreshed 10-inch cousin: users get an extra inch of screen real estate, a roomier keyboard, and more than 7 hours of battery life (its smaller kin, the D150, lasts an hour less). But although it’s larger, the 751h has a weaker processor. The result is a netbook that looks and feels great but offers slower performance than other machines in its class.

Design

If you’ve seen the 10-inch Aspire One D250, the 11.6-inch version will look familiar. It, too, has a glossy black lid with Acer’s metal logo impressed in the lower corner; the lid picks up fingerprints fairly easily. Like the slightly more upscale Timeline series, it has a gray palm rest and keyboard deck with a black keyboard and thin bezel to match.

As with the Timeline series, the overall effect is conservative, but not cheap-looking. The real cornerstone of the Aspire One’s design is not the color scheme anyway, but its thinness. Whereas its competitors, such as the ASUS Eee PC 1005HA, can be as thick as 1.4 inches and weigh close to 3 pounds (the 1005HA weighs 2.8), the Aspire One has a minimal footprint of 11.2 x 7.8 x 1.0 inches, although it weighs 3 pounds (and 3.6 with its adapter). In the hand, it feels just slightly heavier than the Toshiba mini NB205, but that’s offset somewhat by the thinner build.

The only catch: its six-cell battery juts out the back, whereas some netbooks, such as the Eee PC 1005HA, have comparably sized batteries that are more flush with the system (and manage to deliver longer battery life, to boot. More on that later).

Keyboard

Like the Aspire Timeline 3810T, the Aspire One 751h has raised keys, whose plastic has a slightly textured feel. The layout is close to full size, and we appreciate that the right Shift key is full size and in the proper place. Touch typists will have no problem with this netbook, but we noticed that the keyboard flexed as we pounded out responses to IMs.

On our first Ten Thumbs Typing Test, we scored 71 words per minute; our highest score on our desktop computer is 88 words per minute. Then, we immediately took the test again and scored 86 words per minute, which suggests you’ll likely acclimate quickly.

Touchpad and Touch Button

When we reviewed the latest 10-inch Aspire One, we complained about the tiny touchpad. With the 751h’s slightly wider footprint, however, comes a wider touchpad (2.5 x 1.6 inches), which was a pleasant improvement over the D250’s 2.0 x 1.5-inch pad. It’s still fairly short, though, especially compared to the NB205’s (3.1 x 1.6 inches) enormous touchpad.

We have a bigger concern the single touch button, which we found too stiff and narrow. Aside from the stiffness, we would have preferred two buttons, as there are on the NB205 and other netbooks.

Display and Sound

One thing the 751h offers that most of its 10-inch competitors don’t is a high-res screen. Whereas the 1005HA, NB205, and 10-inch Apsire One all have displays with 1024 x 600-pixel resolution, the AO751h’s 11.6-inch display has a resolution of 1366 x 768. Those extra vertical pixels, in particular, mean you won’t have to scroll down as often when you’re viewing pages, a common inconvenience with netbooks.

We were immediately impressed by the screen’s brightness. When we watched a Saturday Night Live sketch on Hulu.com we enjoyed pleasant colors and, moreover, good viewing angles even from oblique side angles. The glossy finish limited our viewing angles from the front, however, when we dipped the lid forward slightly we were still able to make out the clip. By the time we got to a 45-degree angle, however, the screen appeared washed out.

The volume, as you would expect with a netbook, is weak. Watching a clip in a quiet room with the netbook right in front of us, the sound was never too loud. Music, too, sounded predictably tinny, but no worse than it does on other netbooks: the bass in “Seven Nation Army” by The White Stripes, for instance, was distant.

Ports and Webcam

The 751h has a standard selection of ports: three USB ports, VGA output, an Ethernet jack, headphone and mic ports, and a 4-in-1 memory card reader. The memory card reader, VGA, and one USB port on the right side, and the rest on the left.

The netbook comes with an embedded 1.3-MP webcam. In a Skype chat, our friend reported minimal latency with better colors and brightness than on his Apple iSight camera.