The Aspire Timeline has been one hell of a sparring partner these past few weeks. First I had to come up with the name itself, then the marketing messages and website content and finally the retail information content (leaflets you’ll find in the stores) that we’re still working on as I write.

When the product description first arrived, the key messages we had to underline were very simple:

    8 hours battery life
    2 kilos
    Ultra-thin

The big deal with the Timeline is the duration of the battery. It might not be an ultra-high-end notebook in terms of price but it really has an ace up its sleeve which in many ways makes it absolutely priceless. There’s a whole bunch of technologies at work that together make this one of the most efficient notebooks out there. It practically does away with battery-life-worries.

I’m not sure there’s a single feature of this notebook that hasn’t been studied to make it more efficient.

If any of you are car fans, you can think of the Aspire Timeline series like a Lotus Elise. Colin Chapman’s motto of “add lightness” here has been transformed into “add efficiency”. One of the paragraphs you’ll see in the product leaflets makes this very clear:

From the choice of ultra low voltage processors to the thin, LED backlight LCD panels, every component that consumes power was chosen and laid out to make the Timeline series over 40% more efficient than comparable notebooks.

Once we had the name (for the record, Timeline was chosen from: Aspire Hero – Aspire Ultra (which was chosen for a model of the Aspire One) – Aspire Timeline – Aspire Timeless – Aspire TimeOn), we set to work on the messages knowing that we had to come up with a headline that communicated those three points above in a way that made them stick in the mind.

“Light as your time can be” is the campaign message, which has the dual meaning of lightweight notebook and that with Aspire Timeline, your time just got easier to manage (battery doesn’t run out on you).

But the real killer headline, the one I’m writing this post about, was one we never thought would get approved but the marketing director loved so much it became the teaser headline.

Time=Weight³

You might have to think about it for a while, but basically, the duration of the battery life (8) is equal to the weight of the machine (2) cubed. Of course you can’t convert the units but the maths equates and we had a killer teaser headline which was posted to numerous journalists literally hours after being approved so that they could put the launch event into their schedules.

But then, as the invites were sent out, and the event was confirmed, the phone rang and the boffins from Taiwan gave us the bad news (specs).

    13.3″ –> 1.6Kg –> up to 8 hours
    14″ –> 1.9Kg –> up to 9 hours
    15.6″ –> 2.4Kg –> up to 10 hours

WTF? 10 hours??? OK there were no benchmarks and nothing was official but that was the time the technicians had achieved and so that was what our headline had to express.

Now our 2 kilos/8 hours equation no longer worked. Even with a massive asterisk with “depending on configuration” it wasn’t going to hold up to close scrutiny. But the “formula” idea had been created and published so we needed to revise it.

And so it became this:

Time≥Weight³

which thanks to Acer America’s conviction that the American public wouldn’t “get” the whole kilos thing meant the final version which some of you may have seen looks like this:

Time(h)≥Weight(kg)³

which I personally can’t even look at, it’s so bad.

Of course, there are still no official benchmarks to prove any of the duration times the guys from Taiwan had achieved, which means that a) the official word on battery life is “more than 8 hours…” and b) the original headline would have worked fine. Forget about it…