Acer Aspire Timeline Ultra M3-581TG review

Acer Aspire Timeline Ultra M3 review pictures

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The Aspire Ultra M3 may be primarily made of plastic, but it's actually a fairly handsome design. Save the gunmetal-grey keyboard tray and a pair of shiny silver Acer logos, the entire chassis has a sleek, textured matte black finish that feels good in the hand, resists fingerprints, and whose polished surfaces gleam when light hits them just right. It's a shame Acer had to cover the palmrest with Intel, Nvidia and Windows logo stickers, but amusingly Acer tries to make them blend in: they're of a greyish silver color that doesn't completely clash with the rest of the design. The lid has a thin aluminum alloy cover of the same matte black, which feels nice and cool to the touch. All in all, the Ultra M3 looks great when turned off, but build quality and ergonomics aren't nearly so good. The laptop's plastic and thin metal components don't make for a rigid enough frame to resist flexing and bending when you press down or even just open the lid, and on our review unit, there's a gap in the seam near the DVD drive and the right side of the keyboard tray bulges slightly. It's not nearly as bad as some plastic laptops I've used, but it feels flimsy and cheap compared to most of the aluminum ultrabooks I've reviewed.

With a slimline, tray-loading DVD drive and a full-size SD card slot on the left side of the machine, and all the system's cooling inside the completely bare right, Acer couldn't find any room in the 20mm thin chassis for ports on either side. They're all around the back, every single one, and that means you'll have to reach around your 15-inch screen to plug in the power jack, up to three USB peripherals (including one USB 3.0), or even a pair of headphones. It's a constant annoyance. Gigabit Ethernet and HDMI ports are also around back, which does make some sense for docking purposes, but the location of Acer's power button does not: it's located on the front lip of the laptop, right beneath the touchpad, and it's a travesty. Whether I was holding the front of the laptop to stabilize it while using the touchpad, or simply using it on my lap or carrying it around, I constantly wound up accidentally putting the laptop to sleep or shutting it off by accidentally bumping that power button.

On the plus side, there's a removable upgrade panel on the bottom of the machine: you can swap out memory sticks, the mSATA solid state drive, the mini-PCIe wireless card, or even the 2.5-inch hard drive, with only a few minutes and a miniature Philips screwdriver to do so. The hard drive bay comes empty if you start with an SSD, so adding loads of magnetic storage is an exceptionally easy upgrade.

If you buy the Acer Ultra M3, you'll be settling for one of the worst screens on an ultrabook yet. Like the display on the Dell XPS 13, it's a glossy 1366 x 768 LCD panel with truly terrible viewing angles, except here it's even worse: Acer's bumped up the size to 15 inches without increasing the resolution. What that means in plain English is that you can see some rough edges on your icons and in your images, and despite the physical size of the screen, there's not a lot of virtual real estate for multitasking. If you tilt the screen even slightly up or down, the colors will begin to invert or wash out, and there's not a single position you can place your head where the top and bottom edges of the screen will simultaneously display accurate color. It's also got a fairly large plastic bezel, and the hinges aren't as firm as I'd like: the screen is prone to shake slightly while typing.

At the very top of the chassis, right underneath the LCD screen, there's a logo that reads "Dolby Home Theatre | Professionally Tuned." If I were a professional working for Dolby, I'd probably try to sue. The speakers on the Acer Aspire Timeline Ultra M3 aren't just the worst I've heard on a laptop, they could possibly be the worst drivers I've ever heard on a device of any sort, including the tiny ones that go into cheap pack-in earbuds, corporate speakerphones, and the occasional singing birthday card. I might be exaggerating a tiny bit, but a quick listen of Adele's "Rumor Has It" made me wince, as the harsh, muddy sounds squelched their way out of the plastic echo chambers beneath the palmrests. Oh, did I forget to mention that Acer pointed the speakers straight down? If you use the Ultra M3 on a flat surface (or worse, your lap) you can add "muffled" to the list of adjectives describing their terrible sound.

It's hard for an established manufacturer to make a truly bad PC keyboard these days, with years of practice under their belt, and user opinions can differ on what makes for a "good" keyboard, anyhow. Still, it's self-evident that Acer's keyboard isn't up to spec: the keys feel cheap, shallow, mushy and plasticy, and the keyboard tray flexes when you use them. They're basically the same set of flat, flimsy keys we disliked on the Acer Aspire S3, right down to the half-a-peanut sized arrow keys that double as volume and brightness adjustments. This time you also get a 10-key numpad that's equally troublesome. I wouldn't call the keyboard an absolute dealbreaker, though, unless you plan to type in the dark. There's no backlight.

One of the nice things about a 15-inch laptop is you can usually avoid touching the trackpad while you're typing on the keyboard, so even if palm rejection is poor, you probably won't accidentally cause a catastrophic incident by clicking something you didn't want to. Unfortunately, Acer doesn't take full advantage of that fact, as the Ultra M3's single-button Elan touchpad typically errs on the side of taking too much effort to use. It sometimes feels like you need to press down with a little effort to get two finger scrolling and other gestures to work reliably.

Between that effort and a lack of inertial scrolling, it can feel like a chore to slide down long lists with the default touchpad settings, but assuming you're technologically savvy enough to find the drivers, you can adjust them quite a bit. Also, the textured plastic surface feels good and you can tap-to-click fairly well, although the touchpad's physical button is pretty shallow. Honestly, it's surprisingly decent as far as Windows touchpads go. You will probably want to turn Drag and Drop off, though. Theoretically, if you tap an object twice and then drag, that object will follow your cursor until you let go, but in practice the Elan touchpad seemed to like to drag and drop even when I merely brushed objects on my way past them.

Gaming

If you're seriously considering the Ultra M3, though, I'm guessing you've got games on the brain. While I'm afraid even the highest-specced Ultra M3 can't truly run Battlefield 3 at ultra settings and maintain a playable framerate — I averaged 23.37 frames per second in my benchmark run, which is quite low for a fast-paced shooting game — it is most definitely playable at medium settings, where I managed to keep the framerate in the high 30s and low 40s, and you can even bump it up to high settings if you're willing to tolerate slowdown during firefights. To put things in perspective, Battlefield 3 is probably one of the most graphically intensive games on PC, and to see it even run at medium on a laptop this thin is something special.

Older games, like my benchmark favorite Just Cause 2, can run at maximum settings at up to 50FPS, and even add some anti-aliasing to smooth out the jagged edges without suffering greatly. For comparison, most other ultrabooks we tested could barely break 10FPS at the same level of detail. Skyrim, meanwhile, was nice and playable at high settings, varying between roughly 30FPS and 50FPS depending on the action.

The Ultra M3 has a couple of quirks you should probably be aware of, though. First, you're going to need to keep the AC adapter with you to enjoy its full potential, because game framerate plummets when the laptop isn't plugged into the wall. Nvidia confirmed that the system throttles itself when it's not plugged in, and there's no simple way to override that in software, so all the gaming and theoretical benchmarks you see here were run with the laptop constantly powered. Second, I'm not sure the Ultra M3's current display drivers are entirely stable. On three separate occasions, the machine blue-screened while I was running a game, and blamed those drivers for the failure. Mind you, the current Kepler drivers are in beta, and Nvidia's got a pretty good track record for updates, so I imagine issues will get ironed out soon. If you're buying an Ultra M3 tomorrow, though, it could be an issue.

Before you install those games, you'll probably want to spend some time removing gobs of bloatware, too, including trial versions of McAfee Internet Security, Norton Online Backup, NTI Media Maker, and MyWinLocker, as well as NewsXpresso, AUPEO! Personal Radio, Fooz Kids, a reskinned WildTangent called Acer Games, the Bing Bar, Nook, a pair of cheap Acer-branded iPhoto and iTunes look-alikes, and website shortcuts to eBay and Netflix. There are constant reminders to register bits and pieces of software, unless you nip them in the bud. It's not a pretty sight.

While I obviously wasn't able to tell how long you can actually play games on the Ultra M3's battery (and that's kind of a shame), the non-removable lithium-ion pack actually did fairly with daily tasks. The system managed 5 hours and 42 minutes in our official Verge Battery Test, which cycles through a series of popular websites and high-res imagery with the screen brightness set to 65 percent, and I was able to get a full five hours of real-world use on two seperate occasions. Obviously that's not nearly as good as the eight hours of battery life that Acer and Nvidia promise and slightly behind the likes of a MacBook Pro running OS X, but it's well above average for a 15-inch laptop with gaming chops and not bad for an ultrabook either.

For everyday use, the Ultra M3 runs fairly cool and quiet, but that's not the case with games: the fan gets noisy, and the right rear corner can get uncomfortably hot when playing. Between the heat and the fact that you'd be obstructing a vent, you won't want to play anything with the laptop on your actual lap. That said, it's not too bad with the notebook placed on a desk, and both the palmrests and all-important WASD keys stay cool if you do that.