Acer Aspire Timeline Ultra M3 review
With sleek lines, a 15.6in display and a massive battery life, this well-made ultra-portable lets you work all day
The Acer Aspire M3 is a slim ultra-portable with a 15.6in screen and a stunning matt black finish. It feels incredibly well built, too. Unusually, the power switch is hidden on the edge of the lower front lip of the laptop, making it a bit of a challenge to find initially. On the plus side, it’s hard to hit it by accident.
The M3 has flat, widely spaced keys, a broad and completely flat wrist rest and a large touchpad, which is positioned beneath the space bar. There’s more space between the edge of the computer and the keyboard, and this can feel rather odd if you’re used to typing with your wrists flat. The keys could afford to be a bit more responsive, too. Indeed, it can be difficult to gauge whether you’ve struck them hard enough to get a response. However, we were pleased to note that there aren’t any oddly positioned extra keys to reduce our typing accuracy and the numeric keypad is tidily tucked away on the right-hand side of the laptop. Even the large off-set touchpad didn’t get in the way and its size makes precise pointer control easy. We also liked the buttons, which are integrated with the touch surface.
The M3 has a 1.4GHz Intel Core i3-2367M. It’s not particularly powerful, as evidenced by its overall score of 29 in our benchmark tests, but that’s good enough for most tasks, including word processing, using the internet and even a bit of image editing. The system has 4GB of RAM and easily handled our resource-intensive habit of working between large numbers of open browser tabs.
The processor has on-chip Intel HD Graphics 3000, which produced a frame rate of 15fps in our Dirt 3 test. You’ll have to knock the graphical quality down a bit get a playable frame rate, but it’ll run most 3D games at low quality settings. Even though it has decent processor power, the M3 lasted for an incredibly long 9 hours and 11 minutes in our battery life test. If you turn off Wi-Fi and lower the screen brightness it’ll keep you going for an entire working day.
The 320GB hard disk (of which 282GB is available to the user after the recovery partition has taken its share) provides a decent amount of space to install software and create projects, but you’ll probably need external storage if you have a large media collection. At the rear of the laptop are one USB3 and two USB2 ports alongside an HDMI output and the usual Gigabit Ethernet port. The M3 also has a 2.4GHz band 802.11n Wi-Fi adaptor, but no Bluetooth support. We’d have liked a few more USB ports, but it’s great to see USB3 support on a laptop in this price range.
The 15.6in display has a resolution of 1,366×768. It feels a little cramped if you’re used to larger resolutions, but it’s appropriate for the screen size. The display is bright and accurately coloured, although some of the pale grey shades in our test images appeared a uniform white. We found its reflective finish a little distracting when viewing dark screens in a brightly lit room. The integrated speakers are surprisingly loud for an ultra-portable and even have a hint of bass, but they did sound a bit tinny and higher frequencies distorted at volumes of around 80% and above.
The Aspire Timeline M3 is a great laptop if your computing ambitions don’t require too much raw power. It’s sturdy, looks great, has a massive battery life and although we aren’t fans of the keyboard, it’s comfortable once you become familiar with it. For £480, there are other laptops that provide more power, but if portability and a long battery life are a priority, it’s ideal. If computing power’s a priority, the Acer Aspire V3-571 is a Best Buy winner and it has a 2.5GHz Core i5 processor.
Basic Specifications | |
---|---|
Rating | **** |
Processor | Intel Core i3-2367M |
Processor clock speed | 1.4GHz |
Memory | 4.00GB |
Memory slots | 2 |
Memory slots free | 0 |
Maximum memory | 6GB |
Size | 20x376x253mm |
Weight | 2.1kg |
Sound | Realtek ALC269 |
Pointing device | touchpad |
Display | |
Viewable size | 15.6 in |
Native resolution | 1,366×768 |
Graphics Processor | Intel HD Graphics 3000 |
Graphics/video ports | HDMI |
Graphics Memory | 384MB |
Storage | |
Total storage capacity | 320GB |
Optical drive type | DVD+/-RW +/-DL |
Ports and Expansion | |
USB ports | 3 |
Bluetooth | no |
Wired network ports | 1x 10/100/1000 |
Wireless networking support | 802.11n |
PC Card slots | none |
Supported memory cards | SDXC, MMC |
Other ports | 1x 3.5mm headphone output, 1x 3.5mm mic input |
Miscellaneous | |
Carrying case | No |
Operating system | Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit |
Operating system restore option | restore partition |
Software included | Acer Backup Manager, CyberLink MediaEspresso, NTI Media Maker 9 |
Optional extras | none |
Buying Information | |
Warranty | one year RTB |
Price | £465 |
Details | www.acer.co.uk |
Supplier | http://www.amazon.co.uk |