Acer Travelmate 800 (Intel)
The Acer Travelmate 800 was the first notebook to arrive for the review and as we unpacked it and turned it on we discovered that either desktop replacement notebooks had stepped up a notch since the last time we reviewed them, or the Acer was streets ahead of the competition. As the other notebooks began to roll in over the next week or so we discovered that it was a little bit of both.
These machines have certainly stepped up a notch and are very feature rich. In the past, models that packed in the features lost it severely on the notebook tests such as battery life and weight. In this case, some of the notebooks posted more than four hours of run time. OK, some are still very hefty, but hey, you can't have everything ... yet.
The Travelmate 800 has a 15in LCD panel. Its CPU is an Intel Pentium M at 1700MHz, it comes with 512MB RAM, a 60GB HDD unit, and a CD-RW/DVD combo drive. There's no shortage of connectivity options, lacking only a flash memory card socket, a serial port, and a PS/2 port. Anything else you could ask for is included.
The keyboard is well laid out and the pointing device is of trackpad design. There is also a four-way scroll button mounted between the mouse buttons. The keys on the keyboard are slightly bowed which takes a couple of minutes to get used to, however it seems slightly better than the average straight keyboard.
Overall it's a very impressive notebook, the quality of design and construction is excellent and the unit feels very robust. It is also backed up with very good test results. While there is smart card support, we would have liked to see some type of flash memory card support, CF or SD/MMC. However with four USB ports and a PCMCIA port, it would not be too difficult to add this support. The inclusion of firewire, Bluetooth, WLAN, wired LAN, and modem means that all communications bases are certainly covered. It would be very difficult to find a better desktop replacement notebook.
| Product | Acer TravelMate 800 |
| Price | AU$4499 |
| Vendor | Acer |
| Phone | 1300 366 567 |
| Web | www.acer.com.au |
| Interoperability |  |
| Almost as many features as its Ferrari sibling. | |
| Futureproofing |  |
| Very good expansion potential. | |
| ROI |  |
| Very well priced, performance is slightly above the average on some tests, and the longest battery life of all units in this review. | |
| Service |  ½ |
| One-year warranty is average, but includes a two-hour service. | |
| Rating |  |
I'm surprised that in a 'high-end desktop replacement notebook' category Dell didn't think to submit their new Inspiron 9100.
To quote from Reuben Lee, ZDNet, 04 March 2004
'The Inspiron 9100 is probably one of the best notebooks around that can truly replace the desktop PC, offering speed and excellent 3D graphics performance.'
Having just purchased one I would have to agree.
I would have truly liked to have seen this cat set amongst these pigeons.
What was Dell thinking?