The good: Slim, attractive design; excellent battery life; reasonably priced.

The bad: No optical drive; clunky single mouse button.

The bottom line: The 13-inch Aspire Timeline 3810T largely lives up to its lofty battery claims, while keeping the chassis slim and the price down.

Read full review of the Acer Aspire Timeline 3810T »

By Dan Ackerman, CNET.com
Jul 3, 2009

Acer's new Timeline series of laptops, including the 13-inch Aspire 3810T, aims to combine the thin, sexy designs of more expensive laptops with cost-saving, low-power processors. But that's a direction many PC makers are moving in, thanks to budget-friendly CPUs such as the AMD Neo and Intel CULV family. So Acer needed a bigger hook, such as the Timeline's claims of all-day, 8-hour computing.

We generally take such claims with a grain of salt, as they usually require a fairly rigid set of preconditions: Wi-Fi turned off, screen brightness turned way down, etc. However, the S$1,698 (US$1,222.02) Aspire Timeline 3810T managed to impress us with its 5-plus-hour battery life in our much more rigid testing regimen (and it would probably get closer to 8 hours under casual use). Add in the decent industrial design, light weight, and reasonable (at least compared with other slim 12- and 13-inch laptops) performance, and it all adds up to a compelling 13-inch alternative.

Note that Apple's basic 13-inch MacBook offers similar battery life for S$100 (US$71.97) less, plus it includes an optical drive. But that system weighs much more and has less RAM and a smaller hard drive, making for an interesting tossup between the two.

Editors' note : This review is based on tests done by our sister site CNET.com. As such, please note that there may be slight differences in the testing procedure and ratings system. For more information on the actual tests conducted on the product, please inquire directly at the site where the article was originally published. References made to some of other products in this review may not be available or applicable in Asia. Do check directly with your local distributor for details.

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Design

While perhaps not as striking at the MSI X340, another recent inexpensive, thin, 13-inch computer, the Timeline's gray metal lid and overall sturdy construction give it a more professional feel. It's slightly lighter than Dell's upscale 13-inch Adamo, and the backlit-LED screen helps keep it fairly thin (but not in the same category as the MacBook Air or Adamo).



The large, flat keys will feel familiar to anyone who has used an Apple or Sony Vaio laptop, and typing felt comfortable and natural. The touchpad is smaller than you'd find on a MacBook, but still usable. We weren't crazy about the single rocker bar that acted as the left and right mouse buttons; besides simply preferring separate mouse buttons, it's stiff and unresponsive--you have to make sure to give it a solid press in order to register. The touchpad understands a few multitouch gestures, such as pinching to zoom a photo, which is useful, but the implementation is nowhere near as seamless as what you'd find on a MacBook. Above the keyboard, a small row of touch-sensitive quick-launch buttons control the Wi-Fi antenna, a built-in backup program, and a power-saving preset.

Features

The 13.3-inch widescreen LED display offers a 1,366 x 768 native resolution, which is standard for a 16:9 screen this size. More common are 16:10 displays at 1,280 x 800. Text and icons were highly readable, and while still glossy, the screen was not as susceptible to glare as most.



The two big things you'll find missing on the Timeline 3810T are an optical drive and Bluetooth (although both are available in related 14- and 15-inch configurations). We're perfectly happy to skip the DVD burner, but Bluetooth is very handy for tethering a 3G smartphone, or for connecting a travel mouse.

Tags: Apple MacBook, Intel Core 2 Duo, Acer Inc., Intel Corp., Dell Adamo

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