Acer has been rolling out 11.6-inch mini laptops for quite a while now and the company is enjoying great success with this size. Acer 721 is clearly the fastest mini laptop I have tested as-long-as you do not take the graphics performance into consideration. Also, it does not have the best battery life out there. So, should you buy one?

Acer has improved its built quality by a long margin with the Aspire One 721. Everything from its shell to the hinge felt very solid. It comes equipped with a glossy display that is visible from multiple angles. However, it looks the best when viewed head on. There is a bit of glare that is reflected back, but I did not have any problems in looking at the screen when typing this review. It comes with lots of ports that include three USB 2.0 ports, HDMI, VGA, LAN, microphone, headphone jack along with an SD card reader.

The keyboard on the 721 mini laptop is great. It stretches from one edge to other. At first, the keys felt a bit uncomfortable as I found the keys a bit too big for my liking, but after 5 minutes, I was cruising at over 100 words per minute. That said, I am not a big fan of those small arrow keys. Touchpad is also big enough for a mini laptop that has a 11.6-inch display. Performance-wise, it blows away most of its competitors, thanks to the powerful AMD Neo K125 processor and Intel GMA 4500 graphics. The unit came with a 6-cell, 4400mAh battery and I was able to achieve a good 4.5 hours of runtime on a single charge. These are not bad figures for a mini laptop this powerful.

Its bottom features a large panel which can be easily removed by unscrewing few screws. This reveals hard disk drive and RAM to the user. There are two RAM slots allowing it to be upgraded to maximum of 4GB.