Finding ways to differentiate your product in the notebook market can be difficult. Most companies are currently going with the Intel Atom N270/N280 CPU combined with the 945GSE chipset. The result is that performance is nearly identical between similarly equipped netbooks, although as we saw with the ASUS 1005HA and the GIGABYTE M1022, there are still differences when it comes to battery life and features. Acer looks to separate their latest Aspire One 751h from the crowd by bumping the screen size up to 11.6", which also has the very noticeable benefit of providing you with a 1366x768 native resolution. Here's a rundown of the features and specifications.

The upgrade in LCD and chassis size would normally result in lower battery life, but Acer counteracts that by switching to a lower power Atom Z520 CPU and the US15W (Poulsbo) chipset (with SCH LPC Southbridge). The Atom Z520 processor isn't actually that much slower than the N280, as it runs at 1333 MHz in comparison to 1667 MHz; it's a difference of 25%, but netbooks aren't designed to be fast systems in the first place. Giving up a bit of CPU power in order to get a larger LCD is a compromise many people would be happy to make, provided there aren't other drawbacks. The change in chipset is more of a mixed bag, offering clearly inferior 3D performance as well as noticeably slower 2D performance. Video playback without proper hardware acceleration (i.e. YouTube) suffers a lot on the US15W/GMA 500, with significant stuttering any time you try to interact with the system -- i.e. opening a menu. However, with proper hardware support you can get very good x264 playback, including up to 1080p support. Try that on a GMA 950 with an Atom CPU and it will fail miserably.

It's worth noting that we received the Aspire One 751h-1192 with a 6-cell battery, and as you might expect that means roughly twice the battery life of models that use a 3-cell battery. There are numerous other 751h models available, including options that ship with 2GB RAM and a 250GB hard drive (i.e. the AO751h-1196). Given the much higher starting price of around $470, you'd be better off buying the base model and upgrading the components on your own, but other SKUs have better pricing.