In many ways, the Acer Aspire One AO751h, the company’s first 11.6-inch netbook, is an improvement over its recently refreshed 10-inch cousin: users get an extra inch of screen real estate, a roomier keyboard, and more than 7 hours of battery life (its smaller kin, the AOD150, lasts an hour less). But although it’s larger, the AO751h has a weaker processor. The result is a netbook that looks and feels great but offers slower performance than other machines in its class.
Design
If you’ve seen the 10-inch Aspire One AOD250, the 11.6-inch version will look familiar. It, too, has a glossy black lid with Acer’s metal logo impressed in the lower corner; the lid picks up fingerprints fairly easily. Like the slightly more upscale Timeline series, it has a gray palm rest and keyboard deck with a black keyboard and thin bezel to match.
As with the Timeline series, the overall effect is conservative, but not cheap-looking. The real cornerstone of the Aspire One’s design is not the color scheme anyway, but its thinness. Whereas its competitors, such as the ASUS Eee PC 1005HA, can be as thick as 1.4 inches and weigh close to 3 pounds (the 1005HA weighs 2.8), the Aspire One has a minimal footprint of 11.2 x 7.8 x 1.0 inches, although it weighs 3 pounds (and 3.6 with its adapter). In the hand, it feels just slightly heavier than the Toshiba mini NB205, but that’s offset somewhat by the thinner build.
The only catch: its six-cell battery juts out the back, whereas some netbooks, such as the Eee PC 1005HA, have comparably sized batteries that are more flush with the system (and manage to deliver longer battery life, to boot. More on that later).
Keyboard
Like the Aspire Timeline AS3810T, the Aspire One A0751h has raised keys, whose plastic has a slightly textured feel. The layout is close to full size, and we appreciate that the right Shift key is full size and in the proper place. Touch typists will have no problem with this netbook, but we noticed that the keyboard flexed as we pounded out responses to IMs.
On our first Ten Thumbs Typing Test, we scored 71 words per minute; our highest score on our desktop computer is 88 words per minute. Then, we immediately took the test again and scored 86 words per minute, which suggests you’ll likely acclimate quickly.
Touchpad and Touch Button
When we reviewed the latest 10-inch Aspire One, we complained about the tiny touchpad. With the A0751h’s slightly wider footprint, however, comes a wider touchpad (2.5 x 1.6 inches), which was a pleasant improvement over the AOD250’s 2.0 x 1.5-inch pad. It’s still fairly short, though, especially compared to the NB205’s (3.1 x 1.6 inches) enormous touchpad.
We have a bigger concern the single touch button, which we found too stiff and narrow. Aside from the stiffness, we would have preferred two buttons, as there are on the NB205 and other netbooks.
Display and Sound
One thing the AO751h offers that most of its 10-inch competitors don’t is a high-res screen. Whereas the 1005HA, NB205, and 10-inch Apsire One all have displays with 1024 x 600-pixel resolution, the AO751h’s 11.6-inch display has a resolution of 1366 x 768. Those extra vertical pixels, in particular, mean you won’t have to scroll down as often when you’re viewing pages, a common inconvenience with netbooks.
We were immediately impressed by the screen’s brightness. When we watched a Saturday Night Live sketch on Hulu.com we enjoyed pleasant colors and, moreover, good viewing angles even from oblique side angles. The glossy finish limited our viewing angles from the front, however, when we dipped the lid forward slightly we were still able to make out the clip. By the time we got to a 45-degree angle, however, the screen appeared washed out.
The volume, as you would expect with a netbook, is weak. Watching a clip in a quiet room with the netbook right in front of us, the sound was never too loud. Music, too, sounded predictably tinny, but no worse than it does on other netbooks: the bass in “Seven Nation Army” by The White Stripes, for instance, was distant.
Ports and Webcam
The AO751h has a standard selection of ports: three USB ports, VGA output, an Ethernet jack, headphone and mic ports, and a 4-in-1 memory card reader. The memory card reader, VGA, and one USB port on the right side, and the rest on the left.
The netbook comes with an embedded 1.3-MP webcam. In a Skype chat, our friend reported minimal latency with better colors and brightness than on his Apple iSight camera.
What's the point in buying a new iPhone if it looks exactly like the old one? Because once you start using it, the speed of the 
Like we said, from the outside the 3GS is exactly the same as the 3G. It's slightly heavier and has glossy text on the back, but if Steve Jobs whipped one out in public before it was announced, you wouldn't have been able to tell the difference.
The shot above illustrates the fact. The two phones may look similar in how much finger and face grease are on the screen, but the iPhone 3GS is still usable and doesn't have the problem of "sticking" in certain areas that are slightly greasier. It's also easier to clean just by wiping on your shirt. The glass treatment won't eliminate smudging from your bodily secretions altogether, but it's a very useful improvement for something you're touching all the time.
The 3GS display is ever-so-slightly warmer than the 3G's, having a yellow/orangish tint when viewed side by side. If you remember, the 3G's screen was also warmer than the 2G's. It's not distracting in any way, and the warm screen is slightly easier on your eyes even if the brightness is bumped up high.
The video really shows how fast the iPhone 3GS is. Safari, Email, Camera all load noticeably faster than on the iPhone 3G (both running 3.0 software). Even booting the phone takes about half the time. Apps with long load times, like Sims 3, Oregon Trail or Metal Gear Touch all show how much faster you get up and running on the new device. Seriously, everything is faster. It's exactly the same experience as switching from a two- or three-year-old computer to something brand new. Your apps all look the same, but they load and run much more smoothly. Even if you're doing the same things on both machines, the new machine is that much better to work on.
By tapping on the screen and activating the auto-everything—not just auto focus but improved auto exposure and auto white balance—you're gaining the ability to control more of what your shots look like. It's most obvious in macro shots where the subject is only a few inches away (above). Those two photos were shot from the exact same distance in the exact same lighting. You can also see in the gallery below that the 3GS is slightly better in low-light conditions (something the 3G was no good at), as well as having better overall auto white balance.
The video quality, on the other hand, is pretty good for a cellphone. Apple claims up to 30 frames per second, and as this video of an HD recording of SNL shows, it comes pretty damn close. Even if it's not quite 30FPS at all times, the video is smooth as hell. Recording still isn't great in low light since it's a physical limitation of cameras in general, but at least it's fluid. The tap-to-focus (and re-expose) feature also carries over to video, which you can use to "aim" your camera at a part of the scene.
The compass app, along with the magnetometer, is great at pointing you somewhere in the general direction of North. It also doesn't matter which way you're holding the phone—either parallel or perpendicular to the ground—the arrow and numbers will still more or less give you a sense of where you're facing.
Our first generation iPhone review verdict was to wait. Our iPhone 3G review gave the go-ahead to finally mount up. The only issue with the iPhone 3GS, if you already have the 3G, is that it's not all that different of an experience.