Acer TravelMate 630: A powerful P4 M Notebook

Zatni Arbi, Columnist, Jakarta, zatni@cbn.net.id

There are several interesting things about Acer. The company, which is the biggest personal computer maker in Taiwan and the third biggest worldwide, used to make notebooks for other computer vendors. As an OEM, we would expect that it would incorporate all the latest technologies from other companies who placed orders with them. Still, Acer seemed to always develop their own designs and technologies for the products that they sold under their own brand.

In the past few years, though, Acer has decided to shift the emphasis into making, marketing and selling their own brand of computers and notebooks. An independent company named Benq was founded earlier this year to market computer peripherals such as monitors, CD-writers and digital cameras that they make. It is clear, however, that Acer has consistently focused its business strategy on the price-sensitive markets such as Indonesia. So far it seems that Acer has been doing well with this strategy.

With Pentium 4 M: Like most other computer and notebook makers, Acer has two different lines of notebooks, the TravelMates and the Aspires.

The TravelMates are intended for business use, for business professionals who want to be able to work in different places with the same computer. The Aspires are like Compaq Presario or HP Pavilion notebooks, they are more for students or home users who like to combine work with play. Courtesy of Acer Indonesia, I was able to play around with two notebooks, a TravelMate 630 and an Aspire 1400XC.

There are a couple of things about TravelMate 630 that are no less interesting. The notebook is neither especially thin nor lightweight, and this is quite acceptable for a business notebook. It runs on a 1.7 GHz Pentium 4 M with 512 KB of L2 cache, which makes it a really powerful notebook by today's standards, and Acer has added to it the Nvidia GeForce2 100 Go graphics processor.

My demo unit came with a 256 MB of Double Data Rate (DDR) RAM, which is enough to run Windows XP comfortably. Curiously, the demo unit that I received had Windows XP Home Edition installed on it instead of the Professional Edition. I would expect the Pro Edition for a business notebook with so much power as this one. The unit also used a hard disk with only 18.6 GB capacity, which was rather too small for a Pentium 4 machine.

Unlike other notebook keyboards, TravelMate 630's keyboard does not consist of straight rows of keys. Its keys are placed in a rather circular series of rows to make typing more comfortable. This design was first used in one of the older Samsung notebooks, but I praise Acer for bringing it back to life.

Other features of the notebook give it an image of a serious notebook. It has an IEEE 1394 port, two USB ports (one in the rear and one on the left side of the base, a SmartCard reader for security, a DVD drive, an S-Video port -- which I had thought was a PS/2 keyboard or mouse port, a PC Card slot, audio-in and audio-out ports. A removable 3.5-inch floppy drive was provided in the box and could be exchanged with the DVD-ROM drive.

There is a built-in modem and a fast Ethernet port, too. To access the Internet, all I needed to do was to plug a UTP cable to my home networking router. The Internet connection worked right away without a glitch.

My wish list: First of all, it took me some time to find the power switch, which is located on the right side. Some people prefer the power button to be placed outside the keyboard area, so that they can turn the notebook on or off without having to open it. I prefer the button to be placed inside, so that I would not unintentionally push it. It is a personal preference, but fortunately Acer has made the power switch intelligent enough to prevent accidental data losses.

I would also prefer to have the line-in and line-out audio ports placed on the side or in front rather than on the rear as in TravelMate 630. It would make it easier to use a headset for dictation and voice commands. The keyboard could be made a little wider using the extra space now occupied by the keyboard bezel. The good thing is that the keyboard is the customizable Internet buttons could be made to look more elegant instead of looking more like a couple of rubber buttons on a kid's toy gadget. The hinges of the screen could be made tighter, too.

On the upside, the notebook has a very good 14-inch TFT monitor that provides good contrast and color saturation. A more expensive TravelMate 630 comes with a 15-inch TFT. Acer has also moved the PgUp and PgDn keys into the group of the arrow keys. Increasing or decreasing the brightness of the screen is done using the left or the right arrow in combination with the Fn key, and to set the audio volume we use the up and down keys together with Fn. I think other notebook makers should take note of the practicality of this design.

Thanks to TravelMate's DualView feature, the S-Video out allows us to display our presentation notes on the notebook screen while displaying our slides on a TV screen or through a projector.

All in all, the good-looking TravelMate 630 is a flexible package. Its feature set is comparable to a high-end mobile workstation, but -- despite its Pentium 4 M processor -- it may fit power users rather than professional workstation users. At around US$ 2,000, it certainly costs almost half as much as the mobile workstations from IBM or Dell.