Product: Acer TravelMate 800 Price: HK$12,900 Pros: Extensive feature set that includes many ports for connection to peripherals, good graphics card and solidly built Cons: Ports exposed, a little too heavy to be truly portable
Taiwan's Acer has a reputation for producing high-performance, lightweight laptops for a lower price than the big boys such as IBM, Sony and even Dell Computer.
Keen to penetrate the corporate sector, Acer was one of the first to roll out a notebook computer featuring Intel's Pentium M chip and Intel's PRO/Wireless 2100 Mini-PCI card, which gives built-in 802.11b connectivity.
The Acer TravelMate 800 is a wide-body laptop running a 1.6 gigahertz Pentium M processor, 60-gigabyte hard drive and 512 megabytes of Ram. For graphics mavens and gamers, it boasts a sharp, bright 15-inch screen and a graphics chip with 64MB of its own memory.
The adage 'beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder' is true for the TravelMate. Some product reviewers have raved about its design, describing it as slim and elegant, but we do not entirely agree.
Certainly, compared to Dell's latest Inspiron laptop with Centrino technology, the TravelMate 800 looks like a svelte swan. But next to the truly thin and beautiful Samsung X10, it appears chunky and clumsy.
At 2.76kg, it is not a lightweight, either. But as a desktop replacement laptop, the TravelMate 800 is a fairly impressive package that measures just 2.95cm and squeezes an extensive range of features into its gun-metal grey chassis.