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Netbook popularity may be fading, this has become the year of the tablet, but Acer knows what’s needed to keep the segment afloat: fancy colors and silly names. The new Acer Aspire One Happy 2 comes in four bright colors namely “Papaya Milk”, “Strawberry Yoghurt”, “Blueberry Shake” and “Banana Cream”, but even with the cute silly names is the Acer Aspire One Happy 2 a netbook you should own?

Design
The cover of netbook that I have for review is “Papaya Milk” which is basically a nice soft orange color. The netbook is ultra-thin, the keyboard is all white (not too kin on white Keyboards), the power button and touch pad are also “Papaya Milk”. The touchpad is small but responsive, I didn’t like its buttons both the left- and right-click buttons share the same plastic, which sometimes makes them hard to press.

You have 3 USB 2.0 ports, the netbooks measure 1-inch thick and weigh a little over 2.5lbs, didn’t notice too much of a difference in weight in my bag. The keyboard is nicely spaced out; the touch pad is built with Multi-Gesture technology. You have a 10.1 LED LCD screen; the colors on the screen are bright and beautiful.

The Happy 2’s LED backlit LCD screen was quite impressive for watching videos, and I found it quite comfortable to watch. You will also find it features a 0.3 megapixel Webcam, when using Skype the video was crisp and clear, audio was great I haven’t had to raise the volume all the way.

Hardware
The Aspire One Happy 2 runs Intel Atom N570 dual-core processor, integrated Intel graphics, it has a dual-core processor with a frequency of 1.5GHz and Hyper-Threading.

The Aspire comes with 1GB of DDR3 memory and a large 250GB internal hard drive installed and integrated Intel GMA 3150 graphics are used, for wireless networking features 802.11 b/g/n Wi-Fi and fast Ethernet LAN connectivity with Bluetooth.

The netbook comes with Windows 7 Starter Edition; it also preloaded software such as: Nook for PC, Skype, Times Reader and Netflix. The speed on the Aspire was great…until I had three tabs open, then you can see the speed slowly decline, if you want great speed out of this netbook try only keeping two tabs open. The battery life is great I got about 8 hours out of it with two tabs open, now when watching videos I got 6 hour out of it…not bad.

Overall the Acer Aspire One Happy 2 is a good buy, you can pick from four pastel colors that fits your style, its light weight, has a beautiful 10.1 screen, great battery life…But with all these great specs will this make you go out and buy a netbook instead of a tablet, well for $269.99 I would.