Acer Timeline

Acer may have carved out a happy home for itself in the booming market for netbooks with the hot-selling Aspire One series, but the company’s aspirations apparently extend far beyond peddling low-margin $400 computers. Besides its new Atom-powered desktop box hotrodded with Nvidia graphics chips, and a rumored line of upcoming smartphones, the company has also joined the likes of Apple, Lenovo and Voodoo with a new line of long-lasting travel notebooks.

Acer’s Timeline series will include 15.6-inch and 14.1-inch variants, as well as 13.3-inch model that will push into the same hotly contested turf occupied by the MacBook Air, X301, and Voodoo Envy 133. Rather than making its products the lightest or thinnest, it hopes to set them apart with long battery life. The best models should boast runtime up to 10 hours when equipped with an optional solid-state drive.

Specs across the line will include hard drives up to 320GB (or 64GB for the SSD route), Intel Core 2 Duo ULV processors, DDR3 RAM, optical drives on the two larger models. Perhaps most interestingly, they’ll also come with built-in WiMAX modems for use on the up-and-coming Clear network (which, as of now, only covers Baltimore and Portland), and multi-touch trackpads with a handful of shortcuts for scrolling and resizing. Weight will run between 3.5 pounds (for the 13.3 incher) and 5.3 pounds (for the 15.6-inch widescreen model).

For those who have lusted over thin-and-light laptops but been priced out by the handful of premium models out there, Acer’s Timeline pricing might be the most attractive aspect of the new models. Prices should run between $699 and $899. More information can be found at Acer’s Timeline site.