Mini-notebooks, it seems, come to the PC Pro Labs in twos. Hot on the heels of the Asus Eee PC 901 earlier today, we now have one of Acer’s lovely little Aspire One laptops to paw over, and so far we like what we’ve seen.

Straight away it feels sturdier than the Eee, more like a real laptop in its build quality. The curvy lid has a smooth sheen and uses a slightly different type of hinge – set back like a VAIO to make for a thinner lid. The 8.9in 1,024 x 600 screen matches the Asus, yet the more grown-up styling moves it away from that laptop’s my-first-PC feel.

Other than the extra inch or so in the Acer’s width, the keyboards of the two are almost identical: the Acer has its cursor keys slightly offset from the rest to make room for a larger shift key, and also includes the right-CTRL key the Asus lacks. It still retains the annoying half-height Enter key though, something we’ve yet to see a mini-notebook overcome.

The touchpad is responsive in use but it’s a bit too squashed and narrow for comfort, and we can’t stand Acer’s positioning of the mouse buttons either side of it. It’s fiddly and hard to get used to, particularly as there’s a large enough gap beneath the pad to fit them on the edge of the base.

The One comes with 802.11g Wi-Fi, 10/100 Ethernet and three USB ports spread over both sides. There’s a VGA output and two 3.5mm audio connectors, and we were intrigued to see two memory card slots, only one of which acts as a standard 8-in-1 reader.

The other is for storage expansion: when the internal hard disk is getting full, just pop in an SD card and the Acer will integrate it – rather than showing up as a separate drive, you’ll see the hard disk capacity grow as the two are combined. A nice touch, but we’re waiting to hear from Acer how the One ensures important application files aren’t spread across the two – removing the card at a later date could surely render apps useless.

The Acer uses the 1.6GHz Atom N270 processor, so we’ll be interested to see how long the battery lasts. Options start from an incredible £199 inc VAT, which includes the Linpus Linux Lite installation, 512MB of memory and an 8GB NAND flash drive. Others will be available up to £299, which gets you Windows XP Home, 1GB of RAM and an 80GB hard disk.

First impressions are positive to say the least, and we’re currently busy brushing off our benchmarks and getting our XP disks out to see just how it does. Will it be faster than the Eee? The smaller amount of RAM suggests not – although models at prices closer to the £319 of the Eee PC 901 will come with a more sensible 1GB – and the 4,400mAh battery also packs less juice than the Asus.

But we’ll wait for the full results before we cast judgement, so check back for a full review next week.

Click here to see a hands-on video from the Acer launch at the start of June.