I've configured a few of the Acer laptops. I can't speak too much about battery life because I always ran them off of AC, but they seemed to be decent machines. My biggest complaint, which may or not be an issue for you, is the fact that, even with the volume set to maximum, the audio was quite low. Yes, it's a laptop, but I've definitely seen laptops with much better audio.

JAWS ran fine on the machines I worked with. I don't think they had Bluetooth, but I wasn't looking for it either. It may also be that some models offer it and some don't too, so it's hard to say.

My friend Nicole had one and she had it for less than a year and her hard drive died. I know she had an acer but don't know if it was altra portable. I can ask her how she liked it until that happened. I am not sure how jaws worked as far as I know it was fine. She was using a demo so besides that being a pain I think jaws was fine. Let me know if you want me to talk to her about it.

Acer is a great brand, and I have one close friend that uses Acer, it wasn't one of the smaller ones... but supposedly the battery life seems to be okay from what I recall from using her laptop for a time.

My greatest concern about Acer notebooks is the availability of repair parts vs. Dell, IBM or HP. I work off the assumption that Acer quality is almost as good as the others. But, if I need a screen, touchpad or one of the keys replaced a few years down the road, how available will the replacement part be, and how much will it cost? That's why I'm always willing to pay at least $50 more to get a Dell/HP/IBM over an Acer. As a result of where the prices were positioned when we bought our notebooks, my wife ended up with an Acer, and I ended up with a Dell. Both have worked well.