Acer has bucked the trend with the Aspire One.

While the likes of MSI and even Asus are focusing their latest models on the more lucrative £300 market, this little machine is aimed squarely as a replacement to the original Eee 700.

That means the dream features found on the Wind or Eee PC 901 have been ignored in favour of keeping the price low.

A rival to the Eee PC

It's as if Acer interviewed the first batch of Eee PC owners and asked them what would they change about the original machine, and what they would want to stay the same. More powerful processor? Oh, look what Intel has just released, that'll do nicely.

Larger solid state drive? Check, easily sorted. Larger screen supporting a standard resolution? Consider it done. Slightly better designed keyboard? You got it. How about doing these things while maintaining the stunning price point of the original Eee PC? Go on then... if we must.

Price is right

And this is the biggest trick of the Acer Aspire One. Price. While everyone else is off adding features that bump the price tag up, said manufacturers seem to have forgotten why these machines are worth considering in the first place – the price.

£230 isn't a lot to pay for a fully functioning PC that is so utterly versatile, yet weighs just a kilo. Don't be fooled by the size either, this is a keen performer.

Intel's Atom N270 certainly helps to keep things ticking along smoothly, operating at 1.6GHz on full whack, speed-stepping down to 800MHz to help conserve battery life at every opportunity it can.

This is combined with Intel's 945GM chipset to enable the machine to handle media decoding of 720p content.

It's a great way of exhausting battery life of course, but even with the brightness on full, this system still managed just over 100 minutes of continuous use. This leapt to nearer four hours when used for more sober pursuits.

Excellent portability

As you would expect from a sub-notebook, the Acer Aspire One is designed with portability in mind, although the decision to opt for a 3-cell 2200mAh battery as standard does work against it slightly.

Even so, the options for forcing the processor to run at 800MHz are easily accessed, and the brightness settings for the 8.9-inch screen are genuinely usable as opposed to a gimmick.

512MB of RAM would be a tight squeeze for Windows, but is fine for the custom Linpus installation, so there's no excessive caching either. And even if there were, the SSD won't impact performance in quite the same way that a traditional hard drive would.

The tiny chassis doesn't have a lot of room for ports, although even here Acer has been reassuringly sensible. There are three USB ports in total, along with a pair of card readers.

The one on the left-hand side is labelled as Storage Expansion, as it seamlessly integrates this as part of the main storage area. The slot on the right hand side acts like a traditional card reader, and accepts a surprising array of memory cards.

Spacious keyboard

As for usability, stakes are covered. The keyboard is surprisingly roomy, with no tricky layout problems to work around, beyond the slightly small function keys - not a huge problem.

The touchpad on the other hand is the focus of some frustration, being both tiny and annoy to use for clicking on things thanks to the vertical mouse buttons. A travel mouse is definitely something worth budgeting for.

At least you won't need a webcam or microphone, as these are integrated above the screen.

An impressive laptop

The Acer Aspire One is an impressive piece of work.

By keeping a close eye on that all-important price, yet hitting all the major areas that need them, it has produced a wonderfully compact companion for the road, or as a roaming PC for the home.

Asus better watch out, otherwise it'll lose out big time to this tiny wonder.