Review: Acer Aspire Timeline 3810T

A thin-and-light laptop designed for a longer than average battery life

The Acer Aspire 3810T is a thin-and-light laptop designed to offer a long battery life through greater energy efficiency. While it may not quite live up to Acer's claims of eight or nine hours of use, the system is nevertheless well designed and should prove a useful tool for mobile workers.

Available from 15 May, the 3810T is part of Acer's Timeline series of laptops that are intended to offer a full day's work from a single battery charge. However, this is achieved largely through software that configures the system for minimal power consumption by actions such as reducing the display brightness. Without this, the laptop achieves a typical battery life of about three hours.

Battery life aside, the Aspire 3810T has a lot to commend it; at 24mm thick and weighing about 1.6kg, it is comparable to Lenovo's Thinkpad X301 series, widely regarded as one of the best thin-and-light laptop models. It features a decent 13.3in screen, a comfortable keyboard for typing, and a stylish brushed aluminium casing. It is also quite reasonably priced compared with many other thin-and-light models.

Acer is somewhat ambiguous about the target market for the Aspire 3810T. With its understated design and emphasis on long battery life, we would expect it to be aimed at business users. However, it ships only with Vista Home Premium or Home Basic, versions of Windows intended for consumers.

Our review unit was based on an Intel 1.4GHz Core 2 Duo SU9400 ultra-low voltage processor, one of the features Acer cites as contributing to the long battery life and cooler running of the laptop. It also has 2GB of DDR3 memory (upgradable to 4GB) and a 320GB hard drive. A Flash solid state drive is optional. One omission is that there is no drive bay to take an internal CD or DVD drive.

This specification is ample for business applications and gives the Aspire 3810T a rating of 3.2 under the Windows Experience Index built into Windows Vista. This score was pegged back by the graphics performance of the system, with the processor, memory and hard drive all showing better than average scores.

The rest of the specification includes 802.11a/b/g/n Wi-Fi and Bluetooth for communications. Our review unit also had a 3G modem, which is not present on all models. The SIM slot for this is hidden behind the battery pack.

Other I/O consists of Gigabit Ethernet, three USB ports, and a slot for SD Card, Memory Stick and XD Flash storage cards. There is also an HDMI digital video output in addition to a standard VGA connector, plus audio jack sockets.

The Aspire's memory is fitted in two slots, accessible via a cover on the underside of the case. A second cover provides access to the hard drive. There is no slot for a docking cradle.

Review: Acer Aspire Timeline 3810T

A thin-and-light laptop designed for a longer than average battery life

In use, we found the laptop's keyboard comfortable for typing with its large flat keys that have distinct gaps between them, similar to the keyboard of Apple's MacBook Pro.

Above the keyboard is a thin strip with LED indicators showing Wi-Fi and hard drive activity. Some of these are actually cunningly disguised buttons; pressing the Wi-Fi LED turns this on or off, for example, and there are also buttons for the laptop's Smart Power mode (more on this later) and Acer's Backup tool.

The trackpad of the Aspire 3810T is good except for the single bar that makes up both the left and right mouse keys. This is flush with the case and quite stiff to press. A button next to the trackpad turns it off, useful if you are typing a lot or using a plug-in mouse.

Acer's CineCrystal 13.3in display also provides a bright and clear image at its native resolution of 1366 x 768 pixels, at least when the system is plugged into the mains. However, the hinge mechanism of the screen does not allow it to be pushed back very far. As a consequence, it makes the screen less comfortable to read with the machine sitting on your lap. A 1-megapixel webcam is positioned above the screen.

Acer claims a battery life of up to eight or nine hours for the Aspire 3810T, despite the fact that its 5600mAh six-cell lithium ion battery pack is no larger than average for many laptops. Instead, power is conserved largely through the use of a tool called Acer Smart Power that configures the laptop for maximum battery life.

Among the changes this makes is to disable the Windows sidebar, turn off Vista's Aero graphics and switch back to the basic mode, and dim the display backlight considerably.

In tests using the Battery Eater Pro 2.70 benchmark tool, we found that the Aspire 3810T lasted for three hours and eight minutes without Smart Power running, and five hours and four minutes with it. These figures should be taken only as a rough guide, as we tested with other power management settings disabled, and with wireless interfaces turned off.

While the results are somewhat short of the figure claimed by Acer, a five-hour battery life is still impressive for a thin-and-light system. And while it is likely that users could replicate this result on other laptops by making the same configuration changes, Smart Power does it automatically when the power cord is unplugged, then switches back again to full performance mode when mains power is available.

Software installed on our review system consisted of Microsoft Works 9.0, plus a 60-day trial version of Office 2007 Home and Student edition, Google Desktop and a trial version of McAfee's Internet Security Suite.

There were also numerous Acer utilities, including its eRecovery Management and 3G Connection Manager.