2010 Back to School Guide: Acer Aspire TimelineX 3820T

We reviewed the Timeline 3810T back in October 2009, but Acer is upping the ante with the new TimelineX. Is it a good choice if you’re looking for a thin-and-light notebook for back to school? It aims to offer 8-hour battery life and a bright LED backlit display, but does it deliver? Find out after the break.

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Product At-a-Glance

Pros

Great battery life.
Packed with performance.
Roomy multi-gesture touchpad.

Cons

Low-quality display.
Keyboard is somewhat flat.

Summary

The TimelineX 3820T is a great notebook for the mobile student on a budget, but it’s low-quality display and flat keyboard may drive away some picky users.

We reviewed the Timeline 3810T back in October 2009, but Acer is upping the ante with the new TimelineX series. Is it a good choice if you’re looking for a thin-and-light notebook for back to school? It aims to offer 8-hour battery life and a bright LED backlit display, but does it deliver? Find out after the break.

The specs of the TimelineX 3820T we’re looking at today are as follows:

Intel Core i3 M 350 Processor at 2.27GHz
4GB of DDR3 1066 RAM
320GB 5400RPM SATA hard drive
Intel HD Graphics
Windows 7 Home Premium

You’ll find the standard selection of ports from 3 USB ports, an HDMI port, media card reader, Gigabit Ethernet, and a VGA port. The 3820T weighs in at just over 3.9 pounds.

You won’t find an optical drive here, so if you’re looking to watch movies in your dorm room, you’re out of luck if you don’t have a TV. The notebook is largely unchanged on the exterior from the 3810T from last year, save for the brushed aluminum lid. The keyboard is the same chiclet-style like the Apple MacBook, but the keys are fairly flat unlike most keyboards which have curved keys.

The multi-gesture touchpad is nice but the single mouse button below didn’t offer much of a firm click. The glossy screen on the 13-inch screen has a nice resolution of 1366×768 but other than that, the positive aspects of it stop there. The viewing angles on the horizontal end aren’t terribly bad, but on the vertical end tilting the screen back washed it out to a yellow tint.

The 3820T is pretty snappy thanks to the i3 processor and Intel HD graphics, giving it a Windows Experience Index score of 4.7. In our PCMark Vantage tests, the system received a score of 4669 PCMarks. In our Cinebench graphics tests, the TimelineX 3820T received a score of 2480 in the single core test and a score of 5796 in the multi core test. In the OpenGL test, the system received a score of 1775. The system didn’t hesitate at all when we had streaming video going in Google Chrome, a few Office documents open and Adobe Photoshop CS4 open.

While the notebook is rated for up to 8 hours of battery life, we found in our tests that the notebook only ran for 5-6 hours (like its predecessor) depending on the task at hand. Still, great battery life for the mobile student.

If you’re the student on a budget and looking for a thin and relatively lightweight notebook, the Acer TimelineX 3820T is for you, but if you have a little more cash to spend, there are other options available with a better quality screen and keyboard. The TimelineX 3820T is selling at press time for just under $680 with free shipping at Amazon.com.