If you're lusting after the Apple MacBook Air but can't quite justify the £1,150 asking price in these cash-strapped times, Acer might have the answer with the slim and light Timeline Aspire 4810T. Priced at a much more affordable £750 or so, it also boasts amazing battery life.
Design
The 4810T may not be as amazingly thin as the Air, but it's still incredibly slim and light compared to most laptops, measuring a mere 29mm at its thickest point and weighing in at just under 2kg. Unfortunately, the 4810T's appearance is let down by the uninspiring grey finish used on the lid and keyboard surround.
Nevertheless, the keyboard is very comfortable to type on, despite using relatively flat keys, like those found on some of the latest Sony Vaio models. We also like the trackpad, which supports multitouch gestures, much like the Air's. This may sound gimmicky, but it's very useful. For example, to scroll up and down through documents, you track a circular motion on the pad, while swiping across it will move you between pages or photos in a slideshow. You can also zoom out of a picture or page by pulling two fingers apart, and zoom in again by pushing them together.
Despite its small size, the 4810T's connectivity hasn't been overly compromised. It still manages to cram in both VGA and HDMI ports for outputting video to external displays, as well as three USB ports and a seven-in-one memory card reader. On the wireless front, there's draft-n Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 2.0 + EDR. There's no eSATA port and no ExpressCard slot, however. That's disappointing as it means expansion is limited to USB peripherals only.
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