Following on from our test of the Acer Aspire One 110 whose beta version we had the pleasure of testing just a few months ago, the 150 Bb has now been released, this time with a conventional hard disk drive.

Although it looks exactly the same on the outside, this is a more advanced model with a 120 GB hard drive, an extra 512 MB of RAM (1 GB in total) and Windows XP.

Handling & Connectivity
As it ships with the same case, the A150 has the same ergonomic strengths and weaknesses as its predecessor. 

Some minor changes are noticeable though.

First of all, the more powerful components inside mean that the A150 is a little louder than the A110.

Indeed, this is the only netbook we've tested whose fan runs continuously, producing a low buzzing sound which counts heavily against this new model.

Typical webcam shot

We've contacted Acer about this issue, and are more than willing to test another model to see whether or not the problem was confined to our test model.  Having said that, though, the noise issue is also widely discussed in plenty of Internet forums so it's not just us. 

Although the image quality of the built-in webcam is reasonable, if occassionally a little tinged by red, it's the internal microphone that poses the most problems, with so much static that it's sometimes difficult to listen to voice recordings we made to type up later.

The sound it produces is equally poor, and you'll probably need to use headphones unless you're planning to be in an entirely silent environment.

Processor Power
The A150's hard drive packs in 120 GB and is fast enough at reading and writing to compete with the best models from 'conventional' notebooks.

Amongst the netbooks we've tested so far, it was the fastest at copying data to and from an external hard drive.

We've given the A150-Bb five stars because it has solid performances at both reading and writing data, but one netbook we tested, the Asus 901, is considerably faster at reading, because of its flash memory, than it is at writing.

In a side-by-side comparison of the read speeds of the read speeds of the Acer and the Asus shows that Asus has a clear edge, even if its netbook is slower at writing.

The Intel Atom processor is the same as that found in the Medion and Asus netbooks we've also reviewed, and it's difficult to say anything new about it here: it's faster than the other processor usually found in netbooks, the AMD Geode, but draws more power reducing battery life.

Battery Life & Portability
Using our standard test of setting brightness to 100 cd/m², the A150 lasts for 1 hour 50 minutes of continuous video playback.

It's clearly a long way short of the record-breaking autonomy offered by the Asus EeePC 901's five hours, but even the Hercules eCAFE manages three.

The whole thing weighs 1 kg and its charger is 310 g, placing it in between the 200 g of the 901 and the weighty 400 g of the Medion Mini Akoya E1210.