Acer Travelmate 3022 WTMi review

Gallery

Verdict:

The Travelmate is well priced and powerful. But its display, keyboard and touch pad let it down.

Review Date: 27 Jul 2006

Price when reviewed: inc VAT

Reviewed By: Seth Barton

Our Rating 3 stars out of 5

Review
Specs

Acer's Travelmate is the lightest and smallest notebook in the group and has a striking finish, but a disappointing keyboard and touch pad.

FEATURES

The white chassis is unusual for a notebook that has Windows XP Professional Edition installed. It has no internal DVD writer, which keeps the weight down. Instead, an external FireWire drive in matching white plastic is included. If you use the same applications every day, this portable drive shouldn't be too much of a nuisance. A big 100GB hard disk provides plenty of storage space.

The keyboard flexes distractingly when you type on it and key presses don't feel distinct. The touch pad isn't much better. It's made of a plastic that doesn't allow your finger to glide across it smoothly. There are short-cut buttons for wireless networking and Bluetooth, but these are on the front edge and we found it was easy to activate them accidentally.

The display is bright with decent colours but is marred by a grain across its surface. This grain is distracting if you watch video files. The webcam above the display will be handy if you use videoconferencing applications.

PERFORMANCE

The Intel Core Duo T2300 processor is one of the slowest in the group, running at 1.66GHz. Despite this, its score of 120 in our benchmarks puts it in third place in the group. It performed well in our image-manipulation test, where its 1GB of RAM gives it an edge over computers with less memory.

Two batteries are provided. The larger one, which protrudes an extra 20mm from the rear of the chassis, lasted three hours and 37 minutes. The smaller one, which fits flush with the chassis, lasted for one hour and 28 minutes.

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