Acer Emachine EM250 KAV60 Netbook

The Emachines range of netbooks is a strong contender in the ultra affordable netbooks arena. In such a competitive market, anything even the slightest bit different can click and make a good buying decision. Thus we check out the EM250 KAV60 to see what is on offer here.

Design
Aesthetically speaking , the model we received  came clad in a smooth glossy finish for the lid, which in my opinion is quite regular, but the inside wrist rest and touch pad were a cut above the rest in class. They sport a faux brushed gun metal finish, which looks really nice. The keyboard is not full size and  not edge to edge, with typically smaller Shift, Enter and Delete buttons. Pg Up and Pg Dn are squeezed in with the arrow keys. The Dell Min10V had a way bigger keyboard. But tactile feel wise the keyboard is right up there - its response has a certain firmness that compensates for its smaller size. Above the keyboard lie 3 tiny LED indicators and the power button on the other end.

The touch pad response is also very nice, with a similar colored single button for clicking, though without a scroll zone on the side. The connections available are 3 USBs, stereo audio in, Ethernet port and D-Sub out.

The screen is a 16:9, 10.1 inch backlit by a WLED and a 1024 by 600 native resolution affair. There is  Wi-Fi g and a 10/100 LAN port while the battery is a regular 6 cell Li ion strip.

System specs and software
Under the hood are the same regular devices that run most of our netbooks, mainly being the 1.6 GHz Atom N270, Intel 945GSE chipset with integrated Intel GMA 950 for graphics. There is a 160 GB HDD and 1 GB DDR2 RAM.

We received a Linux Boot OS, preinstalled, thus one will need a separate windows installation disc. There are no bundled software, only a utilities DVD, besides that nothing.