Product Reviews

While Averatec's 3300 aims to bring ultra-portable computing to the masses, the Acer TravelMate 3004 is aimed at the premium ultra-portable market.

With a footprint just smaller than that of a sheet of A4 paper, the TravelMate is one of the smallest widescreen notebooks we've tested. The notebook follows Acer's design style of rounded edges and a green metallic finish, and looks like a shrunken version of the TravelMate 8104 reviewed in Labs, Shopper, June 2005. The slim case has ports for almost every kind of peripheral, with three USB2.0 ports on the left and right of the chassis and FireWire and memory card slots on the right, supporting SD/MMC and Memory Stick Pro cards.

There's no optical drive built in, but the notebook ships with a bus-powered FireWire double-layer DVD writer. The supplied cable for the DVD writer is very short, and restricts access to the ports on the right of the chassis when the drive is plugged in, as well as making it difficult to use an external mouse. The front of the chassis has useful disable switches for wireless networking and Bluetooth. It has an enormous 100GB hard

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disk.

The TravelMate's widescreen format makes room for a near full-size keyboard, and the keys have good feedback despite some flex when typing. The touch pad is a disappointment, though. It is too small to be used accurately, and the top centimetre doesn't respond at all, making it frustrating to use.

The 12.1" screen is impressive, despite its small size. With a high resolution of 1,280x800, text is crisp and contrast decent, although blacks are not as dark as they could be. Horizontal viewing angles are good, but the picture fades quickly when viewed from above or below. The wafer-thin chassis feels solid.

With a 2GHz Pentium M processor and 1GB of RAM, the TravelMate was a heavyweight performer in our tests. Its scores in the Shopper benchmarks and PCMark04 were very strong and, unusually for an ultra-portable, it managed to run our 3DMark03 test. The TravelMate's chief disadvantage is its battery life. It is supplied with a normal and a high-capacity battery, but with such a powerful processor the standard battery was drained in just one hour 40 minutes. For working on the move the larger battery is therefore a must, and a life of over four hours is a huge improvement. The chunkier power cell juts out of the back of the notebook, but it adds only 0.2kg to its weight, taking the notebook up to a still highly portable 1.6kg.

Acer's TravelMate 3004 WTMi is a tiny and stylish notebook with an impressive screen and superb performance, but the poor touch pad is a disappointment, as is the battery life with the standard-sized battery. The notebook seems overpowered for an ultra-portable, and we feel the Averatec 3300 offers what you need on the move for a much lower price.