Acer Aspire TimelineX 1830T-38U4G64nki review

Acer’s TimelineX series has impressed us since its launch two years ago. The new 1830T is the smallest in the range, with an 11.6in display, but it includes some technologies that you’d expect to see on larger and more expensive laptops, such as an Intel Core i3 processor, a 640GB hard disk and an S/PDIF audio output.

Granted, the Intel chip is an ultra-low power model – the 1.33GHz Core i3-380UM – but it still achieved an overall score of 25 in our new benchmarks, twice that of the AMD Vision-powered laptops we’ve seen, and it’s far more powerful than the Atom processors found in netbooks. Its advantage of course is that, while providing more than adequate performance for Windows applications, it also uses less power, helping the 1830T last for an incredible nine hours 12 minutes in our light usage test.

Weighing in at a mere 1.4kg, this makes the 1830T incredibly easy and convenient to carry everywhere, and if you’re just writing office documents or catching up on your RSS feeds, you should be able to last a trans-Atlantic flight.

Like many laptops, the 1830T suffers from the twin curses of a glossy screen finish and tight vertical viewing angles. The first helps improve colours, but can also reflect overhead lights, so you’ll have to adjust the tilt of the lid carefully to get the best picture. Once you do, colours are accurate and contrast is acceptable. The 1,366×768 resolution is great for watching 720p HD content; normally found on 15in laptops, in an 11.6in frame it results in greater pixel density, which means finer detail and sharper edges.

As you’d expect on a portable PC, there’s no optical drive, and expansion ports are limited. You only get three USB ports, VGA and HDMI video outputs and a network port. We were pleased to see a memory card reader on such a small laptop, and those with older audio equipment will be pleased to find that the headphone socket doubles as an analogue S/PDIF audio output.

Acer has opted for larger keys on the keyboard at the expense of the touchpad, which is tiny and sits right at the edge of the case. Its two buttons have a light action however and it’s responsive, and even supports multi-touch gestures. The keyboard uses flat-topped keys which have a light but shallow action, so they don’t have as much feedback as we’d like, but despite this we found it comfortable to type on. Only the narrow left Shift key irked us; the rest of the layout was fine.

The 1830T’s design is the same as that of other TimelineX models, which have been around for two years and are starting to look a bit dated, but it’s slim and practical. Its fast processor and huge hard disk put it a class above netbooks, but it still only has an 11.6in screen, which many may find cramped. If this doesn’t bother you, you’d be hard pressed to find a better-value portable computer, so it wins our Budget Buy award.