Heh, I just bought two of these small notebooks for my recent vacation and we (wife and I) lived with them as our only computers for almost 3 weeks. Here are my thoughts...
Hannspree SN12E23BUP212 (mine - primarily used this)
specs:
12.1" 1366x768 glossy
Pentium SU4100 (1.3GHz dual core 2MB cache CULV)
2GB DDR2 RAM
Intel GS45 chipset with IGP
3.4 pounds
5200mAh 6-cell battery
10/100/1000 NIC, B/G/N WiFi
320GB 5400RPM HDD
Win7 Home Premium
pro:
Great size/weight/resolution combo.
Keyboard is awesome to type on. One of the better notebook keyboards I've used.
Touchpad has third button in middle to disable it.
Great battery life. Gave around 4 hours when new, and after a bit of use now seems to be in the 5-6 hour range.
Can play back most 720P HD content using CPU.
Great value at current price (IIRC was over $500 until recent price drops).
Comes with perfect fitting sleeve with carrying handle. Since battery life is so long, often don't need to carry the AC adapter.
Comes with restore DVD (yeah, no built-in optical drive, but still nice touch).
con:
Always having to use the touchpad disable, because keep hitting it and moving cursor with my thumb while typing.
Glossy surfaces, OMG! Wrist rest and touchpad should NOT be glossy. Terrible, terrible. The touchpad also gets sticky - kind of like a hard mousepad that gets worn, if you know what I mean. Basically your finger doesn't glide very well unless you keep cleaning the surface with a microfiber cloth.
Touchpad has multitouch, but it really really sucks and often doesn't detect.
Lowest notch of the LCD's LED backlight is way too dim to be usable. Basically you lower the brightness and it goes dim in incremental notches... and then suddenly BAM it goes almost completely dark on last notch.
Intel IGP sucks. Even WoW didn't play much better than on my (albeit overclocked and lower resolution) MSI Wind netbook.
The Intel CPU only has 6x and 6.5x multipliers so basically power savings just drops it 100MHz at the same voltage of 1.0. This notebook doesn't have the over/underclocking utility that for instance Asus supplies with theirs. I think that could make the battery life and performance balance that much better.
"Warranty Void" stickers over screws on the bottom panel so I can't upgrade RAM or HDD without voiding warranty. Seriously? They put a panel that just covers these items, and then don't allow you to open it?
HDD in two partitions, with Windows partition being pretty small. Why?
No Bluetooth.
final thoughts:
This fixes most of my issues with netbooks. It performs just that much better, which puts it over the edge into being almost completely usable for everything but gaming. Of course netbooks newer than my 1st gen MSI Wind now get much better battery life, but I think 5+ hours is mostly sufficient. On Tuesday I used it on the entire flight from SAN to MKE (almost 4 hours use), and it still said almost 2 hours left. I didn't find myself hitting F11 in the web browser to get more pixels like I ALWAYS do on my MSI Wind. I'm not 100% sure this notebook is a keeper yet, but it sure made my MSI Wind a non-keeper. Anyone want to buy an upgraded/modded MSI Wind that is in perfect shape? Anyways, when actually using this notebook, it didn't feel small like a netbook does. I was able to just... use it normally. Except for gaming. Scrolling up, looks like I have a lot of cons, but really some are just nit-picky and most are because I spent a lot of time with it.
Acer Aspire AS1551-5448 (wife's, I had limited time using it)
specs:
11.6" 1366x768 glossy
Turion II Neo K625 (1.5GHz dual core ULV)
4GB DDR3
AMD chipset with Radeon 4225 IGP
3.08 pounds
4800mAh 6-cell battery
10/100/1000 NIC, B/G/N WiFi
320GB 5400RPM HDD
Win7 Home Premium 64-bit
pro:
Even smaller/lighter than the Hannspree. Seriously it is slimmer and lighter than my MSI Wind netbook!
Great non-glossy textures on the lid and the wrist rest/touchpad.
Multitouch that actually usually works unlike on the Hannspree!
Can actually play games! WoW runs great. Even L4D runs somewhat okay at minimal settings. Borderlands didn't though, and was completely unplayable.
CPU can idle underclock to 800MHz and undervolt to maybe under 0.8v. This is some serious power management here.
Decent battery life. Idle and low usage battery life seems to be 5-6 hours. High usage battery life (gaming?) is 3-4 hours. When new the battery life was around 2.5-3.5 hours, but like the Hannspree it increased over time. Most dramatically was probably the first few hours, maybe because Windows 7 seemed to be... doing stuff in the background.
con:
Touchpad area is not clearly delineated, so sometimes your finger wanders off and you wonder why mouse arrow is not moving. Otherwise, it is a much better touchpad than on the Hannspree.
Keyboard is teh suck! Seriously, it isn't well supported and it has a terrible feel. (Of course this is coming from someone currently using a mechanical switch keyboard at his desk right now.)
No Bluetooth.
Touchpad disable requires an F-key combo.
I don't know how they managed to fuck it up so bad, but the preinstalled anti-virus basically made networking unusable. It was seriously bad, and almost completely unusable. Uninstalled it and all networking problems went away.
final thoughts:
If this one had the bigger mAh battery and keyboard of the Hannspree (and added Bluetooth) it would be near perfect for a small machine. I might have more cons if I spent more time with it, but so far so good.