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I spent a very enjoyable two hours today at the Ingram Micro Showcase. I had a pretty good look at the ASUS Eee 1000, the HP Mini Note and what was for me the star of the show, the Acer Aspire One. Sadly the only camera I had on me was my cell phone so the pictures are woeful.

The ASUS Eee stand had only Windows XP models on display, at which more than one attendee expressed disappointment. The 901 was conspicuously absent, but I was able to get a close look at the 1000. I’m not sure how I feel about the new styling choices – the original EeePC did look particularly cheap, but the glossy finish on the 1000 is a dreadful fingerprint magnet and the chrome highlights look a little overdone. The keyboard is very reasonable size, and would make an appreciable difference to those who found the original Eee too cramped. Unfortunately it still feels dreadfully thin and plasticky to type on. All around though I think ASUS have gently evolved throughout the Eee series to a very solid and capable machine.

The HP Mini Note was definitely the most stylish of the trio. With brushed metal casing and a minimum of frills, it conveys professionalism and class. It’s a real shame they made it completely unusable by loading up a sluggish VIA C7 with Windows Vista. I was surprised though that the performance wasn’t worse – it does seem like it would be usable for light productivity work as long as you were patient with it. While I only had about 15 minutes to fiddle with the device I also noticed that it a lot warmer to the touch than either of the Atom based models. Again, HP had no Linux based models on display which was a disappointment – I’d been hoping to get a glimpse at their SUSE based model. It was also lurking in a dark corner, and even photoshop can’t save that picture. Note to self: You *always* want to bring a real camera.

Then, across the crowded hall, I saw the Acer Aspire One.

It’s very slightly wider than my ASUS Eee900, to accommodate a larger and more usable keyboard. This gives it some quite chunky screen bezels, but the overall weight and size of the unit is still among the smallest of the netbooks. I think the Acer staff were a little bemused when I popped up a terminal and started digging around under the hood.

I was very impressed with the Linpus Lite distribution it was running. The interface draws heavy similarities with the ASUS Easy Launcher found on the EeePC Linux models, but I believe looks even smoother and more appealing. It looks just as hackable, but with more modern underlying libraries which hopefully means it’s easier to add software from a Fedora repository without risking incompatibilities with Acer’s customizations.

I’m trying to arrange reviewing this unit, and I look forward to seeing exactly how hackable it is while still maintaining the Acer drivers and software. An ASUS product manager spotted me shortly afterwards lurking in a corner taking advantage of the free wifi. He was very excited I was using an Eee900, and we discussed the decal I used to decorate it and where to get them from. I didn’t have the heart to tell him I was using it to email my editor about the Acer Aspire One.

I also scored a jar of jellybeans for knowing Lenovo’s product line so well. Yay me!