Acer Aspire One 532g Video Hands-On, The First Ion 2 Netbook

I’ll admit: there have been far more tablets at Mobile World Congress than  netbooks. But I have seen one. As we told you earlier this week, Acer is showing off the Aspire One 532g, which will fully launch in March as the first netbook with Nvidia Ion 2 inside. While I didn’t get to test the netbook’s discrete graphics– or verify its claims to 10-hour battery life– I did come away with a good feel for its design and ergonomics. (Spoiler: they ain’t perfect.)

While the press photo we saw earlier this week showed a deep red netbook, the one I saw today was navy, suggesting it might be available in multiple colors. As you can imagine, the glossy lid and palm rest pick up fingerprints pretty easily. The high hinge and matte black keyboard might give the netbook a dated look, but I think the electric blue touch button, which coordinates with the lid, keeps it stylish.

At first glance, the keyboard looks like it has a tradtional layout, but if you look closely you can see the keys are, technically, separate, island-style. The keys have a shallow pitch, and don’t make much noise when you type. They have a slightly textured finish, that made our fingers feel grounded as we typed. The arrow and CTRL keys are typically squished in the lower right-hand corner, but otherwise, the keyboard feels spacious, and extends from one end of the chassis to the other with little extra space on either side.

The trackpad and touch button are where the 532g’s design begins to falter. The touchpad is on the small side, for one, and has a texture that’s uncomfortably bumpy. (On the plus side, it has a scroll strip.) Meanwhile, the touch button is too narrow. Not to mention, we always prefer discrete buttons, as on the Toshiba NB305. At least this touch bar is easy to press, unlike touch bars on other notebooks we’ve tested.

The 532g’s ports include 2 USB ports, HDMI and VGA output, an Ethernet jack, a memory card reader (I counted support for five formats), and the port for the AC adapter. All the ports are on the two sides; none are on the front or the back.

Spec-wise, the 532g will be the first netbook with the second generation of Nvidia’s Ion graphics platform. It runs Intel’s Pinetrail platform, an Atom N450 processor, and has a 250GB 320GB hard drive, and 2GB of RAM.

Stay tuned for more details in March and, eventually, a full review.