Acer held a press conference today at which they announce several new products. The star of the show was the Acer Aspire One featuring Android. If you’re pondering on the wisdom of putting a mobile phone OS on a netbook, the chief advantage is boot time, and the quoted speed by Acer was 18 seconds. As you can see from this video (link only - embedding not working sorry)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXtXTPYkP8E

Once you’re at a usable desktop, it has to be said that it’s a little strange seeing Android, and mostly because you expect to be able to touch the screen, which this netbook isn’t.

The browser itself also look a little basic, but the notebook itself is a reasonably stylish piece of kit. We’ll give it a full work-over once we get one in the lab. On sale day is October 22nd, as Acer has to wait for Windows 7 to launch, because that’s on here too.

Also on show were some 3D notebooks - as in notebooks featuring displays compatible with 3D. There were some demo’s running, though naturally you can’t see how it looks as you need to be wearing polarised glasses as modelled by this gentleman.

The effect actually works very well indeed - I’m a fan. However, to get the effect just right you need to be standing quite a way from the screen, which means that you can’t reach the keyboard, which could be a problem for a notebook. That aside, I’ll be intrigued to see how these are received by the market. By which I mean people.

The intriguingly titled Liquid is also a nice looking handset and it feels quite good in the hand because and not despite the fact that its larger than many handset.  We look forward to giving this one a good play when we get hold of one.

Just in to the IT PRO labs is this rather lovely looking new netbook from HP - the HP Mini 5101. It really looks the business, with a cool brushed aluminium effect lid, a glossy bezel around the display, a matt black finish and square looking spaced out keys that look at if they’ve been hewn.

There’s no doubt it has a quality look and feel, but then you’d hope so for around £435 excluding VAT. Is it worth the money? We’ll be benchmarking it and running battery tests next week so stay tuned for the full review.

This week Virgin came in to show off its new ‘Freedom’ netbook, at the media company jumps aboard the netbook bandwagon, giving away a machine if you sign up to a new broadband contract of a least £20 a month.For that you get a 10Mb/sec broadband connection, a mobile broadband dongle with a 1GB data cap.

Remember that’s a 24 month contract, and don’t be fooled by the ‘from £20 a month’ - that’s for the first three months only- and you also have to take a Virgin phone line at £11 a month. So unless you’re planning on giving up your BT line, it’s not necessarily the best value.

The  machine is actually one of the nicest netbook we’ve seen,with a super shiny lid display with a smooth gloss finish round the nearly flush bezel round the display.

The keyboard is of reasonable quality too, though it is a bit saggy in the middle, but the trackpad is large and the two buttons beneath it have a good click action.

Inside specs are a rather regular netbook - with a 1.6Ghz Atom processor, 1GB of RAM and Windows XP Home Edition.

It’s available in black or a rather vivid red finish, and comes suppliede with an equally garish red carry puch, and a range of customisable stickers, that give it an slightly forced, ‘add your own flair’ feel.

The main concern is over battery life, which Virgin itself says will only give you three hours or so, a far cry from the 10 hours you’ll get from the best machines out there.

Still, as long as you’ve decided to go with Virgin anyway it looks like a decent machine, but we wouldn’t recommend it let it sway you.

OK, I know I’m a few days late on this one but I thought it was still worth highlighting for those that missed it. Microsoft has backtracked on the artificial limit it had threatened to place on Windows 7 Starter Edition – at least according to Microsoft expert Paul Thurrot on his Windows SuperSite.

The deal was that once Windows 7 was released Microsoft would target a particular of flavour of the OS directly for netbooks, called Starter Edition. This would have the limitation of only allowing three applications to be running at one time, and you’d get a ‘computer says no’ message if you tried to launch any more.

Naturally, pundits were up in arms about this rather Noddy sounding approach- after all, you’d have your browser, your Word application and Spotify open and then you’d be stuck having to shut something down to say, run a video.

Then again, maybe there was something in this. If you’ve actually used a netbook you’ll know that as great as they are in concept they do have their limitations.

Keyboard and screen size are well known, but the 1.6GHz single core Atom that most of them run with 1GB of RAM is not actually that fast at all. After all, it might be lighter on its feet than Windows Vista, but there’s no doubt that Windows 7 is more taxing for a netbook that Windows XP.

So maybe there was some sense in it, protecting poor consumers from the curse of struggling mini machines.

Or maybe not.

Perhaps the great collective that is Microsoft possibly realised that users who found their little netbooks slowing down to much could take the drastic measure of shutting down the applications themselves. It’s a crazy approach, I know, but it might just work.

After all, if Microsoft was to limit itself in that way, the likes of Ubuntu could suddenly find themselves enjoying a bit of a boost, and that’s not something that the folks of Redmond would care for much.