Pulling the 14-inch Acer TimelineX 4820T from its box, a single thing went through the thoughts: this could be a perfect thin as well as light laptop. The $717 complement is about an inch thick, weighs only 4.7 pounds, as well as still has an onboard DVD drive. And distinct a past Acer Timelines and their weakling ULV processors, it has a customary voltage Core i3-350M CPU, 4GB of RAM and the 320GB tough drive. Oh, and it promises over 7 hours of battery life. Sound similar to the undiluted no-compromise ultrathin laptop to you too, right? Well, even after our unboxing, the TimelineX 4820T did live up to many of the expectations, though disappointed in some hapless others. We’ll explain it all in the full review after the mangle. Acer TimelineX 4820T examination

Look and feel

Unofficially, a X at a finish of a new Timeline array stands for “extreme,” but we’re starting to pretend it stands for additional polished. The system’s veteran look is still really most total, though Acer’s combined a bit of pizzazz here and there: there’s right away a silver trim around the touchpad as well as the black brushed aluminum cover gives it a classic look. Even better, the 4820T has really little shimmer as the palmrest is lonesome in a silverish metal as well, yet the shade bezel and trim around the set of keys still gets the hapless black glossy-plastic diagnosis.

The 4820T’s 0.9 to 1.1-inch thick body is the greatest pattern manoeuvre, though. It’s just an incredibly skinny as well as light 14-inch laptop, and the battery doesn’t bulge during all like some alternative ultraportables out there. For comparisons consequence, it’s thinner and ligher than a smaller-screened 13-inch ASUS U30Jc as well as ThinkPad Edge 13. Shoving the 4.7-pounder into a larger shoulder bag was no emanate – you essentially didn’t mind dragging it to and from the bureau. Despite the thin measure, the appurtenance still has room for a DVD player and 3 USB ports on the right corner. We’re not certain why Acer had to line up all the USB ports so close to any other — it creates it tough to concurrently block in multiple devices. An extra USB jack, HDMI, Ethernet, VGA, as well as mic as well as headphone sockets dwell upon a left side, while its 5-in-1 label reader lives on the front lip.

We’ve pronounced this in a last integrate of Acer reviews, but there’s no mistreat in repeating our disclaimer upon a build quality. The make isn’t glorious, yet in this case it’s what you’d expect for a price. There have been tools of the 4820T – particularly a flexy keyboard and cosmetic hinge reinforcements — which don’t have us convinced a appurtenance will age good, though sometimes these have been a sorts of laptops that finish up lasting longer than you ever suspicion. Obviously, you take the possibility with any appurtenance.

Keyboard, touchpad and screen

Acer’s been regulating the same chiclet set of keys on all of the laptops these days, as well as it would be ideally fine with just a few tweaks. The rounded keys have a good volume of bounce, though they’re just too prosaic. We instruct they had a little arrange of bend to them as well as that they melded to your fingers more over time. The genuine kicker, however, is which the row upon a TimelineX 4820T was ridden with bend – only dire a single finger upon a “G” key caused a entire thing to hook. And because of this, there was a slight squeaking sound when we typed this examination. It’s not great, but for what’s value you did type during the fairly quick shave as well as without too many typos.

The touchpad upon a 4820T is utterly inexhaustible in distance. It supports multitouch gestures, yet you turned off the pinch-to-zoom duty given it would incorrectly wizz in upon webpages when that’s the last thing we longed for to do. The scroll strip upon a right corner of it was manageable, however. The singular mouse button didn’t give us any issues, though we’d similar to to take a blade and clout it into two dedicated buttons. The twin speakers on top of a keyboard are decent for personal listening, as well as you could hear the YouTube shave over the TV in a credentials. Yet, they aren’t as shrill or full as those upon the HP Pavilion dm4.

As members of a matte shade lovers guild (seriously, we’d join if this existed), you think the 4820T would’ve been perfect with the non-glossy version of the 14-inch, 1366 x 768 display, but everybody seems set on these glossy, contemplative screens. Like we’ve been seeing on new Acer laptops, the screen’s bright, but observation angles were utterly bad. Horizontal angles weren’t distressing for pity the screen with an additional, though sloping the shade behind when examination a retaining video of Lindsay Lohan’s sentencing caused her face to darken as well as her tears to be indiscernible.

Performance as well as battery life

As a single would design, a TimelineX 4820T’s customary voltage Core i3 processor beats all of a ULV laptops we’ve reviewed in a past couple of months. The 2.26GHz Core i3-350M processor along with 4GB of IMPEL was positively quick enough for our bland routine, as well – we concurrently ran Chrome, Microsoft Word 2007, Tweetdeck and Trillian with no lag, and even adding DVD playback to a mix didn’t delayed things down. It’s not as fast as the Sony VAIO Z with the Core i5 processor as well as GeForce GT 330M graphics, though a Z’s during least double the cost. Cramming a customary voltage CPU into the thinner framework does have the downsides, as well as those distortion mostly in feverishness. For a many part, the 4820T did stay comparatively cool, though programs which were CPU intensive, together with Firefox Beta 4, caused the left palmrest and touchpad to get extremely toasty.

Though a TimelineX is available with a discrete ATI Radeon GPU, the review unit had Intel’s integrated HD graphics. The integrated option was fine for examination YouTube HD videos as well as a local 1080p Green Hornet trailer, though it’s not going to appease heavy gamers. For those which need a extra graphics flesh, a $799 4820TG-5637 with Core i3 as well as ATI Radeon HD 5650 graphics may be a value the extra money.

 PCMarkVantage 3DMark06
 Battery Life 

Acer TimelineX 4820T (Intel Core i3-350M) 4926 1724 5:04 

Dell Vostro V13 (Intel Core 2 Duo SU7300) 2687 556 2:39 

Lenovo ThinkPad Edge 13 (Core 2 Duo SU7300) N/A 905 5:12 

ASUS U30Jc (Core i3-350M, NVIDIA) 4841 1739/3686 4:10 

ASUS UL50Vf (Core 2 Duo SU7300) 3724 827/3438 6:10 

Onto the million dollar question: how does Acer’s make use of of the standard voltage CPU affect a battery holdup of this very moveable laptop? Not much, by any magnitude. The 4820T’s 66Wh six-cell battery lasted five hours as well as four minutes on our video rundown exam, that loops a same video during 65 percent brightness. That’s essentially longer than a ULV-powered Dell Vostro V13 as well as just around a same time as the Lenovo ThinkPad Edge 13. In bland use with lightness set during 75 percent you squeezed about five as well as the half hours out of the system – which should be good enough to final a train float from New York to Boston.

Just like a Aspire One 521 as well as 721, Acer’s loaded up a TimelineX with a bit of software. The desktop comes cluttered with Netflix, Acer games, Norton and McAfee antivirus shortcuts.

Wrap-up

Is a Acer TimelineX 4820T a undiluted ultrathin laptop? Well, it’s surely a step in a right direction, though ultimately what holds this behind is a same things which holds many Acers back, as well as that’s really the substandard build quality. In a case of the 4820T, it’s especially apparent in its flexy keyboard and bad LCD. However, there’s no doubt that it’s in the category much on its own (the Toshiba Protégé R700/R705 falls into the same a single, though we’re still watchful to examination it), and for $717 a 4820T fills a niche for those looking for mainstream laptop energy in a thin as well as light chassis. And, good, that alone may just be soundness for some.