Features & Specifications
The Acer Aspire One D250 I am reviewing today has an Intel Atom N270 processor, 1GB of RAM, 160GB HDD, all-in-one card reader, 10.1-inch VGA display with a resolution of 1024 x 600, and Wi-Fi. Other features include a three-cell battery and graphics via Intel GMA 950 chipset. The machine has a memory card reader, is about an inch thick, and weighs 3 pounds.

Benchmarks
To test the performance of the Acer Aspire One D250 netbook I will be using Battery Eater Pro to get a battery life estimate along with my iTunes encoding test and the movie encoding test I have been using on notebooks and netbooks.

The first test is one of the most important for a netbook or any other notebook computer -- battery life. I used Battery Eater Pro to get a runtime with the machine's LCD at half brightness the machine lasted 134 minutes. With the screen on full brightness, the battery lasted 107 minutes. That is less run time than the OCZ Neutrino that I tested a while back, which I criticized for low battery life. Keep in mind that Battery Eater is harder on batteries than most of us will be.

Next up was my iTunes encoding test. I used an older version of iTunes (7.1.1.1) to encode a MP3 version of the original Stone Temple Pilots CD Core to AAC format and timed the process with a stopwatch. The Acer Aspire One D250 took 9 minutes and 49 seconds to encode the entire album. The OCZ Neutrino took only 8 minutes and 20 seconds, which can be attributed to the faster SSD in the Neutrino I tested.

The final test was my movie encoding test using Windows Media Encoder to turn the HD resolution Wonder of Flight video into a DVD quality file suitable for downloading from a computer. It took the Acer Aspire One D250 17 minutes and 40 seconds to encode the entire video compared to the 17 minutes and 20 seconds it took the Neutrino to do the same thing.

In Use
After the benchmarks were done, I spent some time using the Acer Aspire One D250. The little machine has a very nice keyboard that has a large and properly placed right shift key. The placement and size of the right shift key is one of the faults of some netbooks, but the Aspire One is great in this aspect. The keys themselves are smallish, as is expected on a 10.1-inch netbook. Typing feel is good and the keys offer a nice click when pressed. After getting used to the smaller keyboard, most will be able to type as quickly on it as a larger keyboard.

The screen of the D250 is a glossy unit with LED backlighting. The high-gloss coating means lots of glare, but good colors and black levels for video. I noted no tearing or smearing when streaming video using the Acer Aspire One D250 and the machine works well for Hulu or digital movies.

The onboard sound system is decent with anemic bass, a trait common to most notebooks and netbooks, but volume levels high enough to be able to comfortable listen to music and movies without headphones. The little machine does not include a WAN modem inside, but has a spot for the user to add one.