At a weight of 2.07 kilograms Acer Aspire TimelineX 4820T is reasonably portable for a 14-inch notebook. It has a brushed aluminium lid and palm-rest. The aluminium finish runs along the contours of the keypad, with a glossy black plastic finish on the bezel and keypad adding a touch of class. The wide and seamless touch-pad is a dark shade of grey, giving it a nice contrast against the lighter grey shades on the palm-rest. The palm-rest includes three LED indicators representing the display on, power on and Wi-Fi on/off status from left to right.

The Aspire 4820T incorporates special function keys at the top of the keypad, which are marked with light blue colour-coded icons. Also, the multimedia, volume control and brightness control keys are marked in blue. The built-in speakers are located at the top of the keyboard and make use of Dolby Home Theatre system technology. The keypad keys are flat and isolated from each other by a narrow gap, but this is not an isolated keypad. Rather, Acer chooses to call this a floating keypad. Whatever the name and nomenclature might be, this type of keypad provides optimal navigation space to your fingers and enable consistent tactile feedback to register the inputs accurately. Also, the soft touch keys allow you to type without much stress to your fingers. However, the closely spaced arrow keys seemed to be a hindrance for gaming, particularly the racing genre, where accuracy and intuitiveness matters more. The wide and seamless touch-pad is a relief from all the cramped touch-pads we've encountered. However, the hard touch-pad mouse buttons are not too easy on your fingers. The touch-pad being overly sensitive and this makes it inaccurate, an annoyance that is especially unsuitable for FPS gaming or cursor-precision oriented tasks. Although, the most interesting feature is the multi-touch gesture based zoom-in and zoom-out in Windows 7.

The Aspire 4820T exhibits minimal flex at the hinges, while closing or opening the lid. The LCD screen is glossy, with the viewing angle best suited to right angles for optimum picture clarity. A little tilt of the display hinge either ways, leads to blurry and out of focus fonts and images. The display supports a native resolution of 1366 x 768.

The Acer Aspire 4820T ships with one of each VGA port, HDMI port, ethernet port, USB port, microphone port and a headphone port on the left side. It also incorporates three USB ports and a tray-loading, multi-speed DVD writer on the right side. There is also a microSD card tray-loading slot, just adjacent to the palm-rest towards the left of the LED indicators and an integrated webcam at the top-centre of the screen bezel.

Read on to know the performance, conclusion, specifications, ratings and contact details in the next page...

• Processor: Intel Core i3-370M 2.4GHz
• Memory: 2GB DDR3 RAM (667MHz)
• Chipset: Intel HM55 Express, Graphics chipset: Intel GMA HD
• Hard drive: 500GB
• Display: 14-inch LED backlit
• Bundled Operating System: Windows 7 Home Basic 64-bit>/li>
• Weight: 2.07Kg