Two days ago my new laptop arrived (woot!). I got an Acer (Aspire) Timeline 3810T. The main characteristics of this laptop are that it has 8 hours (that’s right: 8h) of battery power, and that’s it very light weight and easy to carry. For it’s price, the other specs are also quite decent. It has 4GB DD3 RAM, which can be upgraded to 8GB (2x 4GB), 320GB HDD, HD LED monitor with glare (13.3 inch), HD webcam, blue-tooth and some other nice stuff. The only thing that’s less then with the other laptop models in the same price category is the procesor, which is an ULV (ultra low voltage) duo core of 1.4GHz with an FSB speed of 800MHz. Surprisingly it rates better on windows performance index (3.6 vs 3.3) then my one year old HP laptop, which has a 2GHz duo/dual (I don’t know) CPU.
Anyway, I’m quite happy with it until now. It seems to work faster then my old laptop, has more storage capacity, and other nice extras. Some negative points are the keyboard, which is slightly smaller then what I’m used to, causing me to frequently mistype things, and the position of the USB ports, which forces me to put my U3 and dev-usb on different sides of the laptop, which is un-practical in placing and carrying it. Another negative point is the size of the monitor, which makes it less suited for programming with a complex IDE. The reason I chose this model is that although it’s not ideal for heavy dev, it is really good at what laptops are supposed to do: providing an easy way to work or look up things anywhere, without worrying about if you have power or not all the time, and without being bloody heavy/verbose. It might not provide the brute power and larger display of the very expensive laptops, but IMHO you better get a decent desktop pc/workstation then such a model. You’ll be off with better gear for less money, and more flexibility in upgrading, and re-using components.