Acer Aspire 5735 review

The Aspire 5735 is one of a new breed of laptops that boast 16:9 ratio displays. With both Dell and Acer opting for this blueprint, it's one we expect to see more manufacturers adopting in the future.

The benefits of a 16:9 display are limited to watching movies, where less of the screen will be taken up by horizontal black bars, but that's not to say the 1,366 x 768 pixel resolution isn't welcome; the extra width certainly makes it easier to pop a couple of photos or documents side by side.

Quality-wise, the Acer's display isn't the best in the group, but it does acquit itself noticeably better than its 16:9 twin on the Dell Inspiron 1545. Colour reproduction is fairly natural, a trait that keeps skin tones looking healthy, and only a lack of contrast obscures detail in bright areas of the image.

Elsewhere, there's little to moan about. The fact that the Aspire 5735's slightly dull looks are its most serious transgression gives a clear impression of where the Acer's priorities lie. It's a solid, usable laptop, with a reasonable keyboard and a wide, responsive trackpad. And, thanks to the display's extra width, there's even room for a numeric keypad without cramping up the main keyboard.

And there are more reasons to be cheerful, with a decent battery life compensating for the Aspire's 2.67kg frame. Sitting idle, Acer managed to last just short of five hours, although this dropped to only 56 minutes under intensive use.

The heavy-use battery life might not be particularly impressive, but that's due to the Acer's rather rapid turn of speed when the situation demands it. The processor is nothing fancy - just an Intel Core 2 Duo T5800 - but with 4GB of DDR2 memory to keep Vista Home Premium happy, it sailed to a nippy result of 0.95 in our benchmarks.

Only graphics performance disappointed: our Crysis tests climaxed with a poor five frames per second courtesy of the Intel GMA 4500MHD's limited processing power.

But that really isn't a showstopper at this price, and once you've factored in Gigabit Ethernet and draft-n networking, the Aspire 5735 looks an attractive budget portable.

Author: Sasha Muller