With all its headline-grabbing numbers (less than 2 kilos, more than 8 hours battery life), it’s not difficult to see why the Aspire Timeline series is at the top of everyone’s wish list.

The thing is, when something grabs all the attention, inevitably something else slips beneath the radar completely unnoticed.

Which brings me to the Aspire 3935.



The Aspire 3935 is a notebook that my colleagues at Acer marketing really should push a little more. OK, I understand that the sheer cost of product launches means you have to choose which ones are more likely to make money on the investments you have to make and sacrifice the others, but this really is a looker.

Here’s a quick story you probably didn’t know – when we first saw the Aspire 3935 in the product brief we mistakenly thought it was what became the “Timeline” series and actually proposed the name “Aspire Hero” instead. But this isn’t a Timeline model – Laminar Wall Jet Technology isn’t featured on this one – and it’s much less of an extreme-efficiency notebook as a result. Having said that, a battery life of 6 hours isn’t exactly peanuts.



It’s not brimming with everything Acer could have thrown at it either, although with an Intel Core 2 Duo processor (P8700 – 2.53GHz) a gorgeous 13.3″ WXGA Acer CrystalBrite HD display (1366×786), 4GB DDR3 RAM and 128GB Hard disk it still ticks my boxes.

No, the thing that strikes you about the Aspire 3935 is the way it looks. The features are all there but the details are hugely different. The brushed aluminium case is pure style and the colour is undescribably cool. Not cool in a nerdy look-at-me way; no this is way beyond that. It’s cool in the way truly classy objects never, ever need to try. Like some unwritten world order, you don’t mess with the best – it’s just the way things are.



One thing I didn’t notice when I rushed my video together was the frameless screen. Normally you get a couple of centimetres of plastic around the edges which takes the style out of the best of them. The glass on the Aspire 3935 runs all the way to the side of the lid, making the screen look like a sort of mimiature high-end plasma TV. Way cool.


Last night I watched the BabylonAD DVD (truly awful film BTW) on it and the most obvious difference between this and anything else I’ve sat on my lap is the temperature. I swear if it weren’t for the (very silent) fan you wouldn’t know it was on. It’s like room temperature beneath it. Incredible.

So it’s got major thumbs up performance-wise, plus the wife (and everyone else I showed it to) loves the way it looks. I can honestly say that this is the first time I’ve been tempted to hang on to a notebook. Do you think they’d notice if it didn’t go back?

For more pictures of the spire 3935, check out my Flickr pge.