You could say that it’s just typical: after waiting more than a decade for an affordable, portable notebook computer, three turn up at once.

Acer’s Aspire One is launching alongside the Asus Eee 901 but even in an increasingly crowded market it stands out thanks to its low price.

The Aspire One looks smart, is available in white or black, and features a shiny black bezel around the 1,024x600 pixel display. The screen isn’t very bright but its resolution is good enough for web surfing and office work. Acer has employed some slightly over-zealous font smoothing, though, so text appears less pin-sharp than it does on the Eee 901.

All the usual sockets are located on the two sides: three USB sockets, Ethernet, VGA, headphone, microphone and two multiformat card readers. The card reader on the right-hand side works as usual, but the one on the left is designed for more permanent storage expansion; stick a memory card into it and its capacity is seamlessly added to that of the main SSD.

The One’s slim standard battery has a capacity of just 2,200mAh, so despite some useful power-saving tricks, such as throttling the processor down to half its top speed when possible, it’s not particularly long lived. With the screen illuminated but wireless networking disabled, the One gave a low-battery warning after one hour, 45 minutes, then expired after two and a quarter hours. It pales in comparison to the stamina of the Eee 901 and anyone who travels regularly will need to consider the £80, six-cell battery option.

If the battery is a little disappointing, though, the One’s keyboard is something to celebrate. Whereas the Eee 701, 900 and 901 share a keyboard that’s too small to make prolonged typing comfortable, the One has a well-designed keyboard with larger keys that we quickly adjusted to. This is surprising, as at roughly 25x17x3cm the One isn’t much bigger than the Eee 901, but the extra two and a half centimetres of keyboard width make a real difference. Underneath, the touchpad has buttons on either side, rather like the HP Mininote, but a function key can disable the touchpad entirely if it gets in the way when typing.

Inside the One you’ll find a 1.6GHz Intel Atom processor, 512MB of Ram and an 8GB SSD. The spec is high enough to run a few browser windows and a word processor happily at the same time, or to play a DivX video file. A small fan cools the system but it’s quiet enough.

Windows XP Home will be available on more expensive Aspire One models but this £220 model uses a version of Linux. Like the Eee, it uses a simplified program launcher rather than a full desktop, with a selection of useful programs installed. We liked the ability to start Firefox and Openoffice Writer from the front screen, and the email and instant messaging programs can cleverly connect to several services, but generally the Eee’s menus, and taskbar in particular, feel a little more polished. The Linux system takes about 20 seconds to start up and 15 to shut down.

All in all, the Aspire One is hard to criticise. It has a few faults (its software could be better and the battery won’t suit travellers), but the combination of a good keyboard and Openoffice makes it a viable tool for work as well as for sofa surfers. And, although the Asus Eee 901 betters it in a few areas, at just £220 the One is the best-value mini notebook out there.