Acer TravelMate 8471 Timeline Review

TravelMate is a venerable trademark; it dates back to Texas Instruments' line of business notebooks, which Acer acquired in 1997. (Pause for the oldest old-timers to wax nostalgic about the TI 99/4.) Timeline is a label Acer started using last year to promote its Aspire consumer notebooks' battery life. Now comes the TravelMate Timeline: From the name, you'd expect it to be a business laptop with long battery life. You'd be right.

How long? Acer advertises up to eight hours, and we think you'll get an honest six or seven. Our strenuous test sessions, with plenty of DVD movie-viewing and hard-disk thrashing, ranged from four and a half to five and a half hours. At the opposite extreme, Battery Eater Pro's barely-above-idle "reader's test" ran for nearly ten hours. Considering that the battery pack isn't bulbous and bulky -- the Timeline is just over an inch thick and weighs just 4.4 pounds -- we're impressed.

We're impressed with more than the battery, for that matter. The Acer isn't a speed demon, and it isn't cheap at $999, but it's a seductively slim, thoroughly capable business notebook.

A Happy Medium

Before we go any further, we should specify that our test machine is the TravelMate 8471 Timeline, the middle of three models numbered 8371, 8471, and 8571 and fitted with 13.3-, 14.1-, and 15.6-inch screens, respectively.

To get even more specific, ours was the 8471-6306, which carries 4GB of DDR3 memory; a 320GB, 5,400-rpm hard drive; and Intel's Core 2 Duo SU9400 processor -- a low-wattage 1.4GHz dual-core with 3MB of Level 2 cache. Shopping online, you may encounter an $899 Timeline 8471 model with 3GB of RAM, a 250GB hard disk, and a slightly slower Core 2 Duo SU7300 chip.

We're quite fond of 14.1-inch laptops as a good balance between portability and readability. The TravelMate scores well in both. Measuring 9.3 by 13.5 by 1.1 inches, it slips easily into any briefcase, or can comfortably be carried, or even picked up when open, in one hand.

As for the screen, it's first-class, though as usual we stuck to the top couple of brightness settings for the sake of whiter whites. The display offers 1,366 by 768 resolution, with snappy colors and clear details. A webcam centered above the screen performs deftly, albeit with less than Pantone-perfect color accuracy, even in low lighting conditions.

In addition to the tiny microphone placed next to the webcam, there are mic and headphone jacks on the Timeline's left side, along with USB and Ethernet ports and a port for a proprietary docking station. There's also, speaking of venerable, a VGA port, which leads to one of our few outright gripes with the system: the lack of a more up-to-date video output. If HDMI (for output to an HDTV set) was deemed too consumerish for this corporate laptop, why not DisplayPort?

Two more USB ports are at the system's right side, next to the DVD±RW drive. The latter's eject button, in an elegant touch, is on the keyboard, not on the drive. There's an SD/MMC/MS/xD flash-card slot on the computer's front edge. Both Bluetooth and WiFi wireless communications are standard.

Two Dollars

If the TravelMate's screen is first-rate, so is its keyboard: It's full-sized (in fact, the A through apostrophe keys span an eighth of an inch more than our desktop keyboard's 8 inches), with the Ctrl and Delete keys in their proper bottom left and top right corners, respectively. The typing feel is somewhat shallow but responsive and quiet.

Users who are European or bankers or both will appreciate the Euro symbol key provided next to the cursor arrows at bottom right, along with a duplicate dollar-sign key (in addition to the usual Shift-4).

A wide, somewhat short touchpad is below the space bar. Its buttons work smoothly, if a tad loudly. Between them is a fingerprint sensor to automate password and log-on processes.

The 32-bit version of Windows 7 Professional is accompanied by Microsoft Office 2007, McAfee SecurityCenter, and Norton Online Backup trial versions, plus NTI Backup Now and Media Maker and InterVideo WinDVD for the optical drive. Windows' Experience Index benchmark is a humble 3.2, thanks to the Intel GS45 chipset's tepid GMA 4500MHD integrated graphics -- IT managers won't have to worry about staffers playing games on company time.

Our other benchmarks told a similarly mild tale, with the dual-core 1.4GHz system delivering performance numbers in the same ballpark as the dual-core 1.3GHz Gateway EC1430u we tested in December: 2,861 in PCMark Vantage; a lowly 570 in 3DMark06; five minutes instead of a desktop-caliber two or three to render Cinebench R10's sample screen.

That said, we found the Acer subjectively felt perky enough for multitasking office applications, even with the somewhat sluggish OpenOffice.org suite; its boot time of just under a minute takes a little patience, but once it's up and running we never felt delayed or inconvenienced.

Quite the contrary; we felt suave and successful, working on and toting around a handsome thin laptop. Chances are, the 8471 is a couple of hundred bucks above your IT department's budget for broad deployment, but it's definitely tempting -- an appealing combination of size, slimness, and stamina.