Like many stylish laptops today, the Acer Aspire Timeline 3810T brings slim lines and light weight, combined with low-cost, energy-saving CPUs. Since those specs hardly set it apart from a bevy of similar machines currently in the market, Acer chose to market this particular model with a very attractive feature: eight hours of battery life.
As far as laptops go, of course, battery claims rarely live up to their claims. The 3810T, however, manages to come close, outperforming pretty much every other laptop that makes the same claim on a side-by-side comparison. Intense tests, with video-heavy processing nets it close to six hours of performance, which means it will likely survive the full eight hours with regular day-to-day computing tasks.
Build and feel is very sturdy and professional, considerably more so than a few other machines in the same category (which tend to emphasize a little more of their funkier side). The 1,366 x 768 resolution screen offers bright colors and clear lines, along with better performance under sunlight than what we’ve seen in other similar laptops.
Keyboard design is very similar to both the Apple and Sony Vaio laptops, making for a very comfortable typing experience. The touchpad is a little less satisifying, however.
Overall laptop performance is very good, certainly on par with what we expect out of ultraportable machines. The 1.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo ULV U9400 processor, combined with 4GB of memory on our machine, capably works through most any common task you can imagine.
Priced at $899, the size, build and battery performance peg it at a very attractive spot among the current crop of similar devices. Of course, it’s just $100 less than a 13-inch MacBook, which makes for an interesting toss-up.
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