Even as early as this morning, industry sources were quoting March 22 as the release date for Acer's revamped Timeline notebooks. Coming in ahead of schedule, however, Acer today officially unveiled its Aspire TimelineX 1830T thin and light laptop, as well as a handful of other models.

Built around Intel's Calpella platform, the TimelineX 1830T sports an 11.6-inch display and weighs 3 pounds. Acer didn't get too specific with the processor, saying only that it feature an Intel Core 2 Solo chip, but reports suggest it will come outfitted with Intel's Core i5 520UM CPU clocked at 1.06GHz.

Other accouterments include Wi-Fi, a pair of memory card slots, HDMI port, optical audio, three USB 2.0 ports, Bluetooth 2.1, and up to 8-hours of run time on the 9-cell battery (a step up from the 6-cell battery found on previous Timeline models).

Other specs are so far unknown, including RAM and hard drive capacity. So too is the price.

No sooner do you fill up your credit card purchasing the latest components, new technology emerges rendering your parts obsolete. Welcome to the world of computers. This fact of computing isn't limited to just the desktop sector, and even though Intel's Centrino 2 platform has just recently manifested in the market place, the company offered onlookers a glimpse of its next generation mobile platform at this year's Intel Developer Forum in Taiwan.

The new platform, currently code-named "Calpella," will include processors based on Intel's upcoming Nehalem architecture, due out in desktop form next month. As with every subsequent generation of notebooks, part of the focus on Calpella will be on preserving battery life and you can expect a number of new features aimed towards this goal. These include power switches capable of shutting down individual processing cores, and independent voltage for memory and I/O.

"It's a very different platform than anything they've done to date," said Nathan Brookwood, an analyst at research firm Insight 64. "When Calpella shows up, everything inside that laptop will be brand new."

No specific release date has yet been set, but rumblings point to sometime in Q3 2009.