Acer Aspire Ethos 8951G Review

What good is a mammoth 18.4-inch screen on a laptop if you have to sit right in front of it to fire up a slideshow or control movie playback? Acer thinks it has the answer with the Aspire Ethos 8951G, a notebook with a removable touchpad that doubles as a remote control. With a full HD display, Dolby speakers, and Blu-ray drive, the Ethos 8951G packs a veritable home theater into an 8.8-pound chassis. But with a price of $1,599, this system faces hefty competition for your hard-earned cash. Read on to find out if the Ethos is awesome or overkill.

Design

The Acer Aspire Ethos 8951Gs subdued all-black chassis wont clash with anything in your living room, but it wont stand out either. The lightly brushed aluminum-magnesium lid resists fingerprints. Inside, an all-black deck with a chiclet-style keyboard, glossy touchpad, and a few status lights completes the plain but functional aesthetic.
At 17.3 x 11.3 x 1.4 inches and 8.8 pounds, the Aspire Ethos 8951G is significantly heavier than such 17-inch competitors as the ASUS G73SW (16.6 x 12.8 x 2.3 inches, 8 pounds) and the HP Pavilion dv7 Quad (16.3 x 10.8 x 1.2-1.4 inches, 7 pounds). We wouldnt recommend toting the notebook with you to school or work, but you can easily move it around the house or put it in a large backpack and haul it across town to a LAN party.

Keyboard

The Acer Aspire Ethos 8951Gs island-style, backlit keyboard has large, well-placed keys, and provides a reasonable amount of tactile feedback. The palm rest felt a little hard against our wrists as we typed, but we managed a strong 86 word-per-minute rate on the Ten Thumbs Typing Test, a bit higher than our 80-wpm average.

Touchpad / Remote

The 4.25 x 2.25-inch glossy touchpad on the Ethos 8951G pops out of its socket to become a remote. With it, you can control media on the notebook from a few feet away. A mode-change button sits in the upper-right corner of the touchpad. In default mode, the pad remains unlit and you can use the entire surface to navigate around the desktop, tapping to left-click.
Click the mode-change button once, and video and music icons light up on the right side of the pad, along with a media mode changing button and a menu button. Tapping on the video or music icons launches the corresponding section of Acers Clear.fi media player, and tapping the mode-change button toggles between the video, music, and photo viewing modes in Clear.fi.
Hit the button again, and the left two-thirds of the touchpad surface light up with media controls for pausing, playing, and forwarding through your videos, songs, and pictures. The player controls work in both Clear.fi and Windows Media Player, but not in QuickTime. If all of this sounds confusing, thats because it is. It took us a while to get the hang of the layout.
In our tests, the media remote was responsive at up to 5 feet from the notebook, but it became extremely jerky and then stopped working as we stepped back another couple of feet. After we stepped out of range and then back in, the pad sometimes became miscalibrated, so swiping side to side would move the cursor up and down. However, putting the device back into its bay always fixed the problem. The size of the Windows pointer presents a more serious problem, because it can be difficult to see the small white tip of the pointer when youre standing a couple of feet away from the high-res screen.
Unfortunately, when docked or used as a remote, the pad feels slippery; our finger sometimes slid around while we were navigating. Even worse, we found that the pointer often got stuck in the middle of the screen, forcing us to pick up our finger and swipe again.

Heat

The Acer Aspire Ethos 8951G stayed pleasantly cool throughout our testing. After we played video at full screen for 15 minutes, the touchpad measured a cool 87 degrees, the keyboard a reasonable 89 degrees, and the bottom a chilly 84 degrees Fahrenheit. We consider temperatures below 90 degrees extremely comfortable.

Display and Audio

The Acer Aspire Ethos 8951Gs 18.4-inch, 1920 x 1080 LED-backlit screen offers plenty of real estate and vibrant colors. However, viewing angles leave much to be desired, as movies washed out significantly at just 45 degrees to the left or right. Whether we were watching a 1080p QuickTime trailer for Apollo 18 or a YouTube 1080p trailer for Mission Impossible 4, motion was smooth and images were relatively sharp. However, colors in dark scenes inverted as we moved left or right, which is not conducive to multiuser viewing.
The Dolby-tuned speakers on the Ethos 8951G provided accurate music playback that was loud enough to fill a room. When playing both the bass-laden "Forget Me Nots" and the guitar-heavy "Shout at the Devil," we were able to make out some separation of sound for bass and treble, though the playback was not rich and layered like it is on Dells XPS line of notebooks. Toggling the Dolby Home Theater software on and off made little difference in the sound quality.

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