Acer TravelMate 8210 business-friendly portable delivers
Acer’s TravelMate 8210-6597 blurs the line between business and consumer notebooks, making for an all-around good travel companion. While its business side comes through with an included Bluetooth VoIP phone, SmartCard security, and an integrated webcam, its multimedia chops-including a Blu-ray drive and discrete graphics-help justify the high price. The 6.6-pound 8210-6597 is housed in an elegant charcoal-and-glossy-black case and finished with bright silver trim. Under the checkered lid is a curved keyboard, which is roomy and responsive, as is the touchpad controller. However, we found the mouse buttons a bit stiff and noisy. Four programmable quick-launch buttons and a power switch are located above the keyboard off to the right, but the system lacks a set of media control buttons.
The 15.4-inch widescreen display has a 1680 x 1050-pixel resolution, but the screen looked a bit dim and slightly washed out, even with the brightness setting cranked all the way up. The viewing angle however, is quite good, as we saw no significant color shift from the sides. Above the screen you’ll find a 1.3-megapixel webcam that swivels 225 degrees.
You can use the camera for still photography and videoconferencing with the included Bluetooth VoIP phone, a PC Card device that connects to the 8210-6597’s Bluetooth. We tested the phone using Skype and the Bluetooth connection. It worked okay, but we noticed a crackle and time delay on both ends of the call. That’s par for the course with a VoIP and Bluetooth combination, though, and pairing the phone to the notebook was a snap. The webcam is adequate for video chatting, but the images looked slightly grainy.
The left side of the notebook holds a hot-swappable modular Blu-ray optical drive, which means you should be able to play high-definition DVD movies and record to BD recordable media. Unfortunately, we couldn’t get the drive to recognize any Blu-ray discs, but we suspect this is a driver issue that Acer will fix soon. The only option for output to a larger screen is an S-Video connection, but we’d prefer an HDMI port or that the DVI supported HDCP to optimize the HD capability. So the Blu-ray drive will be best used to burn large amounts of data to disc. Getting this system without Blu-ray will save you $1,000.
A green button marked “e” takes you into the Acer Empowering Technology applet, where you can change system and security settings, create backup discs, and restore the system to its original factory settings. Embedded in the front edge of the system are two speakers. The speakers are typical for this class of system: too much treble and hardly any bottom.
The 8210-6597 comes with a pair of SmartCards and 360 Degree Web’s PlatinumSecret software, which, when used in tandem, prevents unauthorized access to the notebook, and more importantly, your data.
The 8210-6597 gets its power from a 2-GHz Intel Core 2 Duo T7200 processor and 2GB of DDR2 memory, which resulted in an impressive score of 286 on our MobileMark 2005 tests. Equally impressive was the unit’s battery life; the nine-cell li-ion battery lasted for four hours and eight minutes. Unfortunately, wireless performance offered a dismal throughput of 6.7 Mbps from 15 feet and 6.3 Mbps from 50 feet.
The ATI Mobility Radeon X1600 graphics managed a very good score of 8,056 on our 3DMark03 tests but crashed when we tried to run the more demanding F.E.A.R. gaming tests. So while you should expect a very good Windows Vista experience (for $2,999), this system is not recommended for gamers.
We would like to see better wireless performance and a brighter display to make the most of the high-end features in the 8210-6597. But there’s a lot to like about this TravelMate, and it’s worth considering for both office workers and travelers, who will appreciate the built-in VoIP phone and webcam.
Add comment March 25th, 2007
