Acer has hit a home run with the Aspire 3935-6504, which combines a stylish design and excellent ergonomics with good performance and battery life—all at a very reasonable $899. Amenities such as a sharp edge-to-edge glass display, powerful Dolby-optimized speakers, and convenient one-touch backup and power-saver buttons go a long toward making this thin-and-light notebook a pleasure to use. Assuming you can live with mediocre graphics performance, the Aspire 3935 is an excellent value-priced notebook you can take anywhere.
Design
Measuring an inch thin and weighing 4.2 pounds, the Aspire 3935 isn’t quite in the ultraportable category, but it’s svelte and easy to carry. Just as important, it looks more expensive than it is. Acer chose a unique, classy golden brown brushed-metal chassis. (One benefit of this color choice: fingerprint smudges aren’t nearly as obvious as with glossy black systems like the Dell Studio XPS 13.) We especially like the textured feel of the deck, which has a subtle pattern of tiny upward-shooting arrows. The build quality feels solid, unlike many other laptops in this price range.
Other welcome touches include the large circular power button, ringed by an LED, and a strip of small but responsive touch-sensitive buttons just above the keyboard. From left to right you’ll find a mute button, volume keys, and dedicated buttons for the toggling Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connections.
To the right of the these buttons is the Back-up button, which launches software from NTI that lets you back up important data (or your entire system) to the internal drive or an external drive. Last but not least is the Acer PowerSmart Button, a large button above this strip that saves battery life when activated. Among other things, entering PowerSmart mode automatically reduces the screen brightness to 30 percent and changes the color scheme to Windows Vista Basic.
Keyboard and Touchpad
The Aspire 3935 uses what Acer calls its FineTip keyboard, which was designed to have large key caps and increased key gaps compared to other notebooks isolated layouts. Overall, we found this full-size keyboard to be comfortable during longer typing stints. Those who prefer some spring to their keyboards may find the keys a tad soft or mushy, but we acclimated within minutes.
The touchpad is plenty large and was very smooth, which made cursor movement effortless. We also found the dedicated scroll area to be responsive. The touchpad buttons, actually a single bar separated by the fingerprint reader, are also well sized and provided just the right amount of feedback without being too loud. If you want to use an external mouse, next to the touchpad is a button for disabling it.
Using Synaptics’ technology the Aspire 3935’s touchpad supports multiple gestures. We had no problems zooming in and out on Word documents and images, as well as breezing through a gallery of images with a two-finger swipe.
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