With us today is Acer’s Aspire Timeline 3810 – the slim notebook with long battery life. How would this notebook fare?
The Appearance
The Aspire Timeline 3810T has brushed aluminum that not only gives it a sleek look but also contributes to its lightweight nature, coming at only 1.6kg. The Aspire Timeline 3810T is 24mm thick and rising just 5 mm at it’s highest.
The notebook opens to reveal a full-sized keyboard that felt firm, to a certain extent it felt as if it was marble.
Here’s a closer look at the keyboard.
On the left, there’s the external display (VGA) port, audio output jack, mic input jack, USB port and the power connector. See that vent next to the display port? It’s the ventilation outlet.
On the right – 2 USB, 1 HDMI and 1 LAN port.
And there’s also the 5-in-1 card reader (SDâ„¢, MMC, MS, MS PRO, xD) on the right side as well.
And here’s the 6-cell battery pack.
The Specification
The Aspire Timeline 3810T features Intel® Coreâ„¢2 Duo ultra low voltage processor SU9400, Intel® GMA 4500MHD, 2GB DDR3 RAM, 500GB Hard disk, 13.3″ 16:9 LED screen at 1366 x 768. For more details, visit official product page.
The Performance
Just as my other tests, I go about my web browsing activities with Firefox 3.0.12 (it’s a resource hogger) doing multiple tabbed browsing and also having TweetDeck running on the background, doing tweet refreshes every 2 minutes or so. I didn’t play any music this time, bear in mind that the screen is also much bigger than any netbook. Monitor was set to maximum brightness.
I started at 100% and after 15 minutes of use, the system was at 96%. With that estimate, we could assume that it’s 16% power drain per hour. That translates to about 6.25 hours worth of computing time. 😀 That’s good, considering I’m not surprised if it could go more than 7 hours should the usage be a little less aggressive and had the brightness reduced a little further.
I love the LCD screen a lot. The glossy screen along with the bright and clear output, I felt very comfortable doing graphic design work on it. Audio quality was good, I don’t know how else to describe it other than it being satisfying. Even the webcam was great, supposedly capable of image capturing at HD 720p, I managed to use it for some video conferencing and I was given feedback that the output was sharp and even the onboard mic captured our conversations clearly.
I think another interesting bit about the Aspire Timeline 3810T was the cooling feature, according to Press Release – it uses a cooling technology developed in collaboration with Intel.
The Laminar Wall Jet exploits a technology that has been used successfully for cooling turbine blades. Through the addition of louvers to the inlet vents, the cooling air flow is redirected along the bottom side of the notebook chassis, bringing fresh air precisely where it’s needed to better cool the skin.
Low Gah Luen, Head of Mobile PC & Peripherals Division (of Acer).
In an air-conditioned room, the processor idles at around 34°C and running them both at full load managed to only peak the temperature at 53°C. What does this mean? It’s good! Heck I’ve even tried it without air-conditioning, ventilation and in a hot room and the system went on and on without having to shutdown due to overheat.
Connectivity / Mobility
The system interfaced well with my 802.11g Wi-Fi signals and also with Bluetooth connection for dialing of 3G.
Despite the 3810T being a regular sized notebook when it comes to footprint, I’m amazed at how light the unit was. Basically it’s a notebook at a netbook’s weight (well, almost). Carrying it all over the place with 1 hand was just as easy as carrying a netbook.
USB ports on both sides added to the convenience, along with the various output options. I love the placement of the card-reader slot, it’s placed on the right side and towards the front making it an easy access.
As for the power adapter connection, it’s placed on the left. I always prefer power connection to be at the back but as you can see from the design on how the LED and battery components to cater for the flip, there’s no way to place it the back.
Ergonomics
I like that the SHIFT key is not placed in awkward fashion like the Asus Eee PC 1002HA. As you can see, the size of the keypad is shrunk as well.
It’s an interesting idea, shrunken directional pads are fine in my book. The only drawback was that it’s uncomfortable for playing games, which this notebook is somewhat capable of.
The multi-gesture functionality to the Aspire Timeline for touchpad convenient, pretty much like how it works on the Macbook and the Eee PC where finger movements add functionality to how things work.
What I didn’t like was the buttons for the touchpad. It was not only tough to click, the one piece nature of the buttons mean you can’t get any click by pressing near the middle. :(For their upcoming revisions, I hope they improve on this part.
Conclusion
The Acer Aspire Timeline 3810T was certainly an impressive notebook. It’s lightweight yet feature-rich, offers decent computing power (Core 2 Duo processor, 2GB DDR3 RAM) and a long lasting battery life.
On the down side, the slim nature of the 3810T meant it had to sacrifice the inclusion of an optical drive while the buttons for the touchpad seems requires some improvement.
RRP for the Acer Aspire Timeline 3810T Notebook is RM 3,299 at the time of this article. You could strike a better deal during the upcoming PC Fair.
ugh the only that triggers my pet peeves, stickers…
i notice lots of lappie comes with too much, erm unnecessary info stickers
if you notice la, most people never remove their stickers. later use until fade. 😀
i guess the rationale is that people know what they have under it. 😀 or for display unit. common practise, the only company I see never have stickers splattered over the wrist area is Apple.
I tried the 4180 yesterday (the 14.3″ version). I liked it EXCEPT – the touchpad would cause the cursor to jump back to it’s starting point for no reason, quite often. Did you have this experience, and do you think the settings could be changed to fix it? I really wanted to like this, since I found it on sale for only $530 US. Thoughts?
By the way, the 4180 has a DVD drive, so it weighs 4.2 Lbs. More than my Dell X200, but still not bad.
I have not such experience with the touchpad. Perhaps it was a showroom unit, they’re prone to get abuses. 😀
I must say, “I can spend my life time with this Acer’s Aspire Timeline 3810 “. It is really worth it.
Yo bro! thanks for the review. i was looking around for one then found ur blog on 2nd page of google search 🙂
.-= EVo´s last blog ..Alamanda Putrajaya Re-discovered by Bloggers! =-.
good to hear that!
saya pengguna acer timeline 3810T, sekitar 3 bulan pemakaian layar mati (gambar ada, tapi tidaka ada cahaya).. karena masih garansi kemudian saya bawa ke service centre, katanya malah displaynya yang kena..kebetulan user dengan produk yang sama pada saat saya mengantar ke service centre mengalami kendala yang sama..?? apa user yang lain juga pernah mengalami hal yang sama?? apa ada yang tau akah cacat seperti ini akan berulang? karena domisili saya di Kalimantan, yang notabene sulit untuk bolak-i ke service centre..terima kasih…
saya pengguna acer timeline 3810T, sekitar 3 bulan pemakaian layar mati (gambar ada, tapi tidak ada cahaya).. karena masih garansi kemudian saya bawa ke service centre, katanya malah displaynya yang kena..kebetulan user dengan produk yang sama pada saat saya mengantar ke service centre mengalami kendala yang sama.. apa user yang lain juga pernah mengalami hal yang sama?? apa ada yang tau apakah cacat seperti ini akan berulang? karena domisili saya di Kalimantan, yang notabene sulit untuk bolak-i ke service centre..terima kasih…
i always look for laptop reviews on the internet before buying a new one, ;-*
thanks for your great review on Acer Aspire notebook series. These days I am looking for a new low cost laptop for my home use. I think Acer Aspire will perfectly match for me.