We were also annoyed by the way that Bluetooth can be turned on and off by toggling Fn-F3 but there's no such control for Wi-Fi. The pair of flick switches on the front of the Aspire One 751 work admirably well for wireless control and the sooner they're transplanted to the Timeline the better.
A perfectly decent laptop
We reserve our final piece of annoyance for the keyboard, which feels good and solid but the Enter key is inboard of the Page Up/Page Down buttons which is a complete no-no in our opinion.
The mouse buttons are formed in a strip instead of two individual buttons which isn’t our favourite layout. The multi-touch touchpad works well enough but is nowhere near as good as Apple’s version. We liked the illuminated button that locks out the touch pad as it comes in handy when you’re typing and don’t want the cursor zipping around the screen.
Just over an inch thick
The 14.1in screen has a resolution of 1366 x 768 and it looks fine, although it is rather shiny and reflective if you have a strong source of light behind you.
Verdict
The new Timeline is a perfectly decent laptop that is saved from mediocrity by a battery life that is, for a notebook, absolutely epic. ®
More Notebook Reviews...
Acer Aspire One 751 |
Fujitsu LifeBook P8020 |
Toshiba Portégé M750 |
Samsung Q310 |
Acer Timeline 4810T
COMMENTS
Linux
Looks like a very nice and reasonably priced bit of kit with an optical drive.
Being a Linux user on desktop, laptop and server I'd say it's likely that a little extra work might need to be done to get everything working, dependent on how standard the hardware is. For example a number of 802.11n wireless adapters are not natively supported within everyone's favourite fluffy distro, Umbongo. It can involve compiling and installing drivers from source supplied by the manufacturer or using an NDIS wrapper.
<M$-Sideswipe-Mode>
Having said that, even if a bit of tweaking is involved to get it all working with Umbongo, it will run like the proverbial hot poo off of a shovel compared to Fistula. And do you really want an OS that isn't sure which CPU is still plugged in? *titter*
</M$-Sideswipe-Mode>
*NIX?
*NIX-friendly or not?
"Then there’s the DVD drive eject button, which mirrors the position of the Power button - we found it was all too easy to press the wrong button when we wanted to turn on the laptop."
I for one would find the reverse quite a bit more annoying... but again, I'm part of these extremely gifted people able to remember the buttons' place after a couple hours using a piece of kit. ;-)
@Linux enquires..
Easy enough to try a CD/DVD version of Linux - get to see how well its works, and it doesn't affect the original OS.
Main complaint...
...is that is it doesn't embiggen your mental capacity to remember where buttons and ports are? How perfectly cromulent.
I Want It!
Seriously, if it were available here... Good build quality, a Core 2 Duo, 8 hours of battery life and only 2kg (together with an internal optical drive) on the 14" model, and, while not too cheap, it doesn't cost an arm and a leg?
