This laptop has nice exterior. The only details that are painted are touchpad buttons. Everything else is either gray or black plastic.
The sound is nice but not perfect. The speakers are located above the keyboard, so you are not going to cover them with your hand, this is good. On-board mic (alsa: Front Mic) works out-of-the-box as well as the external one (alsa: Mic).
My model contains touchpad manufactured by Alps (Alps GlidePoint), which has much lower resolution and has more quirks than the ones made by Synaptics - consider purchasing a mouse. Hardware scroll buttons are messed by default, i order to get all 4 directions working a patch to psmouse module is needed (
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xserver-xorg-input-synaptics/+bug/194403)
Cardreader works great with SD and MMC cards. No other types were tested, while it claims to support XD and Memory Stick PRO.
The battery is 4000mAh, which should provide approximately 2.5 hours of operation in low-power mode. There are no pads on the battery so you can remove it and work on AC and laptop will be stable.
Wi-Fi transmitter module is Atheros AR5BXB63. I had to fetch the development branch to have it supported. Wi-Fi LED will not turn on, it is not yet supported by acer-acpi. The hardware Wi-Fi button does work and it toggles the radio module on/off (see /proc/acpi/acer/wireless for the current status). The connection is stable, with no spontaneous disconnects.
Bluetooth module is manufactured by Broadcom. It is a regular USB HCI device (0a5c:2101), supported by the kernel out-of-the-box.
Video card is nVidia GeForce 8400M G with 128Mb of dedicated video memory, you will need binary-only nVidia drivers to support bells and whistles.
Optical drive is Optiarc DVD RW AD-7530B, supports CD-R/RW, DVD+/-R/RW, although looks like packet writing is not supported. Dual Layer DVD support is claimed as well but not tested.
Display is 15.4" widescreen glossy LCD. The reflections are visible and may be annoying, so you will want to turn off the light sources behind you.
The cooling system is not silent but the sound is not annoying, consider using air conditioning to keep it off.
There are S-Video output, DVI/D-SUB and FireWire ports as well, not tested. There is a window for Customer InfraRed (CIR) receiver but it seems that the receiver itself is not present.
Summary - this is a decent nice-looking laptop with a great number of extra features totally worth the price.
