Acer’s Aspire one makes a splash. A great keyboard, a fine screen and a keen price make for a superb mini-laptop

Our pics and first impressions of the hotly anticipated ultra-cheapie, and yes, it's better than the Eee in several ways.

Dell's long awaited entry into the Eee-class notebook market is a top effort, though not perfect.

The Acer Aspire has a lot of handy multimedia functions that help it work as a desktop replacement/media unit. One of the Aspire’s main selling points is the Arcade feature, which is a Windows Media Centre clone. A button on the notebook fascia opens Arcade, bypassing the Windows OS and enabling all media player functions: DVD, MP3 etc. It works quite well but isn’t as graphically stunning as MCE.

This is not the first 'desknote' that we've reviewed (see Protac DeskNote, June 2002, page 37) but in our estimation the Aspire 1703SC is the first system that truly expounds the virtues of true desknote-ism.

An impressive attempt at a good-value portable PC, but the ergonomics let it down.

A good netbook with lots of storage, but battery life keeps it from being great

A startling achievement: a highly capable mini-laptop for under $700. Only mediocre battery life mars its appeal.

Acer brings 3D to the masses with a 3D screen on a mainstream laptop

A huge 18.4in widescreen, Blu-ray drive and a big hard disk make this a great entertainment laptop

Acer's latest Aspire has the familiar Acer look we've come to expect in recent months but with a few nice tweaks.

The Acer Aspire 1692 WLMi is a story of compromises; a +/-/RAM dual layer burner and gigabit Ethernet are offset by Windows XP Home, only 512MB of RAM and the slowest processor and hard disk of the bunch.

The Aspire is a very good unit with several features which enhance its usability. It will suit on-the-go entertainment and productivity, at a price that won't burn your wallet.

When it comes to accessories, the Aspire has one of the best bundles supplied for this roundup: including an MCE remote and a radio/TV antenna! It also has a decent specification list: 3Ghz Pentium 4; 160GB HDD; and 512MB RAM. The only sticking point here, amongst all this multimedia goodness, is the inclusion of the Mobility X300 video card. It's like building a Ferrari and installing a two-stroke motor. It doesn't make much sense.

'Absolute consistency' are the words we'd use to describe the performance of the Aspire T310. A solid all-rounder, this machine is just as at home gaming as it is doing 2D tasks, such as productivity applications, anti-virus scanning or media decoding. And, as shown by its impressive 4,271 PCMark04 score, it's not short on horsepower.

Slim and stylish, this isn’t the most powerful quad core we’ve seen, but it’s by far the cheapest.

A huge screen and an affordable price, but it doesn’t rival a desktop PC where power is concerned

Another big name brand PC gets a cutting-edge, all-format, high-def optical drive capable of playing Blu-ray and HD DVD.

A very-well designed alternative to big beefy computers which make a lot of noise.

The Acer Aspire SA20 is a machine built on a budget and it performs accordingly.