Welcome to a laptop battery specialist of the Acer Laptop Battery
Are you ready to reach out and touch your notebook? Acer wants you to do just that with its Aspire 5738PG, a 15.6-inch laptop that utilizes Windows 7’s touchscreen support to let you navigate Web pages, zoom into photos, and dabble in multimedia when you place your fingers on the screen. But the system is no one-trick pony; Acer has packed in a fast Intel Core 2 Duo processor, a capable ATI graphics card, and Dolby audio for a relatively low $799. The touch interface feels half baked and glitchy at times, but if you’re looking for an all-around performer with touch as a bonus, the 5738PG is a good choice.
Measuring 15.1 x 9.9 x 1.0 inches and weighing 6.1 pounds, the 5738PG is a tad bulkier and heavier than the 5.6-pound, 14.6 x 9.8 x 1.5-inch Gateway NV, as well as the 5.6-pound, 14.6 x 9.8 x 1.2-inch Sony VAIO NW. The system sports Acer’s with battery such as Acer AS07A31 Battery , Acer AS07A51 Battery , Acer Aspire 4520 Battery , Acer AS07B72 Battery , Acer Aspire 5520 Battery , Acer BTP-43D1 Battery , Acer TravelMate 220 Battery , Acer BTP-58A1 Battery , acer BTP-60A1 Battery , Acer TravelMate 240 Battery classy Gemstone design, which incorporates a dark blue lid (attracting a light amount of fingerprints and smudges), a charcoal gray base (featuring a granulated dot pattern), and black accents throughout.
To the upper-left of the keyboard are easily accessible on/off buttons for Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, an illuminated power button, and the Acer Backup Manager button (which lets users create automatic backup profiles). Adjacent to those are status indicator lights, and to the far right you’ll find dedicated volume keys, along with a user-definable shortcut button. A microphone is positioned dead in the middle.
The wide base affords a roomy and comfortable keyboard with firm, chiclet-style keys that made it easy to tap out documents, e-mails, and URLs. We appreciated the large Shift keys and full number pad. Using the touchpad, we could two-finger swipe through photos, and use pinch gestures to zoom in/out of images. The mouse buttons were quite mushy, and didn’t offer much in the way of feedback. A button to the right of the touchpad allows you to disable it when pressed, and a biometric fingerprint reader is nestled between the mouse buttons to keep data away from prying eyes.
The high-definition 15.6-inch, 1366 x 768-pixel display provided sharp visuals when we loaded up our DVD of The Matrix. Darks scenes and clothing had plenty of richness without being overbearing, but the screen’s glossy coating kicks back heavy reflections.
The Dolby Home Theater speakers (positioned north of the keyboard) served up very clean and loud sound. While listening to Curtis Mayfield’s “Wild and Free,” we marveled at the crispness of the horns and the separation from the high and low-end sounds that were delivered by the Virtual SurroundSound technology. The bass wasn’t as robust as Acer’s own machines that feature CineBass (such as the Acer Aspire 8920G), but the 5738PG certainly sounds better than other notebooks in this price range.
What separates the 5738PG from other mainstream notebooks is its capacitive touchscreen display that utilizes Windows 7’s multitouch capabilities. While reading new messages posted to Twitter, we very much liked how we could zoom in on text to make it bigger by spreading two fingers apart, zoom out by bringing two fingers together in a pinching gesture, or scroll up/down by flicking in those directions with our index finger. When viewing images in the Photos folder, we could page through all of the pictures in the folder by swiping left or right with a single finger, which felt completely natural. In fact, after a few minutes of interacting with the 5738PG in this fashion (and after some initial trepidation), we found it superior to the mouse for navigating photos.
Microsoft’s Touch Pack is also included on the 5738PG; among the apps is Surface Globe, which operates in a similar fashion as Google Earth in that we could zoom in/out of virtually any location on the planet by using pinch gestures. Starting with the image of Earth floating in space, we effortlessly rotated the globe and spread our fingers to zoom in from an orbital view all the way down to street level in just a few gestures. It was simple to execute, and the application was quite responsive.
Overall, touch worked like a charm, but with our fingers constantly pressing the screen, it reclined from a 90-degree angle to approximately 45 degrees over the course of a few minutes. You’ll clearly need to keep one hand behind the screen during longer touch computing sessions to keep the LCD front and center. We also found that the display picked up fingerprints quickly.