
Acer’s Timeline series of notebooks are thin, and kind of light laptops that measure less than an inch thick at their thinnest points, (and under 1.2 inches at their thickest). Right now, the Acer Aspire Timeline is available with a 13.3″, 14″, or 15.6″ display, with weights ranging from 3.5 to 5.3 pounds and prices running between $598 and $899.
In other words, they may be thinner and lighter than most full sized laptops, but these notebooks are still kind of chunky and pricey compared with your average netbook. But now DigiTimes reports that the company is planning on releasing an Acer Aspire timeline notebook with an 11.6 inch screen in July. I wouldn’t be surprised if this new model brought the weight down to around 3 pounds. But there’s still a big question mark in the area of price. While the smaller the screen on Acer’s netbooks, the lower the price, the opposite is true of the Timeline series.
DigiTimes has industry sources who speculate that Acer could phase out the Aspire One 751 netbook, which also has an 11.6 inch display to avoid overlap. But I think it’ll depend on the price point for the Timeline. If the Aspire One 751 with an Intel Atom processor sells for a few hundred dollars less than the 11.6 inch Timeline with better graphics capabilities, a larger hard drive, and so on, I don’t see any reason to eliminate the cheaper model.
I saw the timeline 3810 (13″) today. a few comments:
1. it is nice thin and light.
2. the screen is very glossy
3. it was pretty peppy with Vista running
4. the speakers were ok sounding, but did not get very loud.
5. the mouse buttons are a single “stiff!” bar, which is recessed down below the touchpad – making it a generally uncomfortable experience.
6. You can feel the hard drive spinning, like there’s a bee hive under your palm. That would get old really quick.
stop press, as per this news story:
https://www.fudzilla.com/content/view/14152/1/
I am happy to have an Intel CULV CPU with the nVidia Ion GPU on my 11.6″ ultra-mobile.
AMD Congo please, real GPU’s are us.
The critical decision point will not be the hardware but XP or Vista. Please, please put XP on it!!!!
This or the Dell Mini 11, want one of these for college!
I agree that the cheap model still has it’s own niche ($350 starting price for a very compact 11.6″ screen netbook). Still, it’s got some major flaws including poor battery life for the flush-fitting 3-cell (2.5 hours). Sure you can get it with a 6-cell, but do you want to make an 11.6″ netbook bulkier? The other major flaw is the Z520 atom running at a pitiful 1.22 GHz.
I hope the new model packs a flush-fitting battery that has more juice. And the CULV processor will be a world of difference in performance.
This looks like it’s the computer I’ve been waiting for!
A small, netbook like computer, with full specs and power behind it. And good battery life, as the Timeline series focus is on thin laptops with 8 hour batter life. Depending on the specs and just how pricy this is will determine weather or not this is the new laptop I choose.
I’ve been wanting to get a “netbook” but right now that’d be more of a down grade than an upgrade. So we’ll see what this does.