Acer, with its Aspire One notebook, is one of ASUS' main competitors in the netbook market, a segment that is dominated by the presence of Intel's small-sized Atom processors. Because both Acer's and most of ASUS' netbooks are powered by the same 1.6GHz Atom N270 processor, only a few differences set the two companies' products apart.

Naturally, this has led to a fierce competition between the two, each of them striving to provide improved offers for their netbook systems. While ASUS decided to release several models of its 9-inch and 10-inch Eee PCs, Acer has gone instead for a financial enticement.

The company has announced that it will lower the prices for the Aspire One netbook lineup by as much a $50, thus making a 120GB hard drive-equipped Aspire One, with 1GB of RAM and a Windows XP operating system sell for $349. In the meanwhile, a model with a lower capacity, 8GB SSD and Linux will be priced at $329. It is yet uncertain whether the company has made the price adjustments in preparation for the upcoming "back-to-school" period, or whether it just remembered that netbooks were initially supposed to have low price tags. Whichever of the two might be the case here, the effort is laudable nevertheless.

The systems vendor also made another improvement to the Aspire One product, by releasing a 160GB hard drive and a 6-cell battery option. With better battery and overall more storage capacity, the upcoming Acer netbooks will probably also come with a higher price tag, set somewhere in the $399 area. This is roughly the same improvement that MSI made to its Wind netbook, as we already mentioned in one of our posts from yesterday.

In other related news, Intel has set a new sales target for its highly successful Atom processor. The leading chip maker estimates that a total of approximately 20 million Atom units will be sold before the end of 2008. The number includes the company's ex-Centrino models, as well as the single and dual-core Atoms.