Acer Aspire One 751 Reviewed: Pretty But Dumb

Acer's Aspire One 751 is arguably the company's slickest design to date, with an 11.6-inch LED-backlit display, skinny chassis and nifty angled ethernet and VGA ports pushed back into the hinges.  Problem is, as Pocket-lint have found, it seems the budget all went on design, rather than build quality or specifications: our old enemy the Intel Atom Z520 turns up to spoil the show.

The flat keyboard flexes and bends as you type, and the thin lid – just 8mm – shows exactly why skinny luxury ultraportables go for aluminum or carbon-fiber for their casings: the plastic twists so easily that distorting the screen is the rule, not the risk.  Meanwhile the touchpad is too small and its vaunted-multitouch functionality was tough to use.

But it's the Atom Z520 that really spoils things, running at just 1.33GHz and paired with 1GB of RAM.  While the 1366 x 768 16:9 display is simply begging out for some high-def content, the gutless CPU can't even cope with HD YouTube videos, never mind standard 720p content.

Throw in the sub-3hrs runtime from the standard 3-cell 2,200mAh battery (without taxing the system with WiFi or Bluetooth) or the weight/bulk impact of the 6-cell 5,200mAh pack, and you've a machine that "is a nightmare to live with."  The looks are there, certainly, but you may have to pay more than £379 ($572) to get the hardware that lives up to them.