Did you hear? 11.6-inch is the new 10-inch, and as such, one of Acer’s newest “top-of-the-line” models sports an 11.6-inch screen instead of the usual 10-incher. You’ve seen it unboxed, but in case that’s not enough, we’ve been able to get our hands on one recently and thus, we put it through a quick hands-on test to see how it fares.

The Acer Aspire One 751 moves away from the usual netbook specs of just a few months ago and carries an Atom Z520 processor, Windows Vista, and a very slim and sexy exterior. It has so far proved to be much slimmer than any other netbook I have put against it (except perhaps the 1000HA). It is also quite light considering the size and the 11.6-inch screen really shows a noticeable difference in size compared to other models.


Since the Aspire One 751 is equipped with a fairly larger screen, Acer was able to put in an even larger keyboard than usual, with wider keys and a lot of travel and tactile feedback. I even feel like this netbook’s keyboard has been the best that I have ever used. Its keys are comfortable to type with, and the increased width really helps a lot for touch-typists such as myself.

Key placement has not been a problem at all, and there are still indicator lights just above the keyboard for added convenience. After using keyboards on both 9-inch and 10-inch netbooks for quite some time, the difference of this 11.6-incher’s keyboard is really noticeable in terms of usage.

Acer has equipped the Aspire One 751 with a wide multi-touch trackpad that has a single left/right click button. I used to not care about this feature (multi-touch) at all but after learning how it actually works and what it does, I’ve found that it actually is, in some ways, better than using a mouse. The fact that the trackpad on the Aspire One 751 really helps. Unfortunately, I can’t say the same about the one-button clicker. In usage, it feels like I’m making things hard for myself. Perhaps, one will be able to get used to it after time.

Apart from the fact that it is larger, the Acer Aspire One 751’s 11.6-inch screen seems to bear the same characteristics as the screens found in all other previous Acer netbook models. It is a glossy screen, so inherently it is quite problematic to use outside or anywhere with a lot of ambient light. Otherwise, it is a fine screen with lots of brightness and color.

The jump from 10-inch to 11.6-inch is even bigger, and the resolution is bumped to 1366 x 768 pixels. While it only really offers an inch and a half more screen real estate, the resolution helps make things even better.

Ports-wise, it offers the usual, 3 USB ports, mic/headphone jack, built-in card reader, etc. Its main difference when it comes to this aspect of being a netbook is basically its slimmer profile. It is a lot slimmer than many other comparable netbooks before it, and that’s saying something. Even with its 6-cell battery, it is not quite as heavy as other netbooks I’ve been able to hold in my hand.

And speaking of the battery, Acer claims that the Aspire One 751 can reach up to 8 hours of computing easy. This, of course, really depends on how you use the netbook and what you use it for, but we’ll see how it really performs in real life tests once we finish setting it up for a review. As far as performance goes, it works OK. Not really blazing fast, but I didn’t notice any noticeable slowdowns in a unit equipped with 2GB of RAM and the aforementioned Atom Z520 processor (clocked at 1.33GHz). We’ll be prepping up a full review of this netbook to be published soon, but for now take another look at it in the gallery below.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 29th, 2009 at 6:54 am and is filed under 11-inch, Netbook, acer, competitor, eeepc.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.