Acer Aspire Timeline 3810T

Full Review

This is the smallest, most portable member of Acer's Timeline series of notebooks, one of the most inexpensive 13-inch notebook available in the market. Design's similar to the Acer Aspire Timeline 4810T we reviewed earlier—no flashy colors—the matte screen lid is of polished gray, with an Acer logo proudly emblazoned in the centre, and so is the rest of the unit. In some ways the Aspire Timeline 3810T feels like some of the premium ultraportable laptops in our Top 5.

One of the most noteworthy features of the Acer Timeline 3810T laptop is its slim design. The notebook's less than an inch thick and weighs just 1.6-kg, which is extremely good for an entry-level ultraportable laptop.

One of the most noteworthy features of the Acer Timeline 3810T laptop is its slim design. The notebook's less than an inch thick and weighs just 1.6-kg, which is extremely good for an entry-level ultraportable laptop. The chiclet-styled keyboard is black in color, and so is the screen bezel which has a 1.3-megapixel camera and microphone grooved in just above the screen. The 13.3-inch glossy screen is LED-backlit and has good horizontal viewing angles.

Despite being a compact laptop, the Acer Timeline 3810T's build quality is pretty good. Of course, its claim to fame is its greater-than-average battery life. No surprise it has an ultra low voltage (ULV) processor at its heart—the Intel Core 2 Solo SU3500 1.4-GHz—which is quite power-efficient. But assisting the tame processor is a 250GB hard drive and 2GB of DDR3 RAM. You'll further find three USB ports, VGA-out, memory card reader, and an HDMI port carefully placed around the chassis' edge. The Acer Timeline 3810T also supports Gigabit Ethernet and Draft-N Wi-Fi. But disappointing it doesn't come with an optical drive or an ExpressCard slot. It comes with Windows Vista Home Basic operating system.

This is the first laptop we benchmarked on Windows 7. A WorldBench score of 64, and PC Mark Vantage score of 1793, is generally low, but average for an ultraportable laptop. Watching high-definition 720p movies was good with no stutter, but the laptop couldn't play 1080p files. This is no gaming laptop, but despite the ULV processor, it handles every other day-to-day task pretty well. Working on the chiclet-styled keyboard is very good; same with the touchpad—it's very responsive and has a clever toggle button above it to turn it off. Onboard sound, by laptop standards, is decent. The Acer Timeline 3810T truly shines with its battery life, though. We got 7 hours 45 minutes from it while browsing the Web on Wi-Fi and full screen brightness, with some intermittent music on iTunes. That's just shy off Acer's claimed eight-hours and impressive for any laptop.

Bottom Line

For Rs. 35,000, the Acer Timeline 3810T takes the cake for an entry-level ultraportable laptop. Recommended for anyone who doesn't mind sacrificing on an optical drive—or some processing power to get close to eight hours of battery life from their laptop.