Editors' Rating
| Service & support |  |
6.0 |
| Design |  |
8.0 |
| Features | |
8.0 |
Published: 21 Mar 2007
Acer’s TravelMate 6463WLMi is a large notebook — large enough that it's likely to spend more time on your desk than in your luggage. It has plenty of features, including a superb high-resolution screen, a built-in swivelling camera and fingerprint recognition; it also comes at an attractively affordable price.
Design
The TravelMate 6463WLMi is a sizeable notebook. It weighs a maximum of 3.12kg with an 8-cell main battery and a second 6-cell battery in the media bay. You can reduce this depending on your choice of battery and media bay configuration, but only to a minimum of 2.7kg. The system's desktop footprint is 36cm wide by 27.1cm deep. It is 3.55cm high.
One piece of good news: when you do need to carry this notebook, the two sections of the clamshell are held together by a sturdy clip that leaves no possibility of their being prised apart in transit.
Both the screen and the keyboard are superb. The 15.4in. screen has a native resolution of 1,680 by 1,050 pixels, which is easily enough to have two document windows open at the same time. The wide-screen format will be especially attractive for heavy spreadsheet users as there's a whole 33cm of viewing width.
The keyboard has plenty of space to inhabit, and Acer has used this well. The keyboard has Acer’s familiar 5-degree curve, which gives the notebook a characteristic look but doesn't affect its usability in any way — even when carrying out fast touch typing.
Above the half-height row of function keys is a bank of five buttons. One is the main on/off switch, while the other four can be used to launch applications. They are pre-set to launch Outlook for email, Internet Explorer for web browsing, Acer’s Empowering Technology toolbar (which offers access to a range of system settings and options) and the Launch Manager software (with which you can change the configuration of all four buttons). You can’t change the buttons’ icon markings though: two of these indicate email and the Web, while the other two are marked with a P and an E.
Beneath the keyboard sits a touchpad with a pair of left and right mouse buttons beneath it. Between the mouse buttons is a four-way scroll button that's useful for moving through longer documents, web pages and wide spreadsheets.
Acer provides a second cursor control mechanism in the shape of the green FineTrack button, which nestles between the G H and B keys. This can be used with a second set of mouse buttons (handily picked out with a green stripe) sitting above the touchpad. These auxiliary mouse buttons are divided by the fingerprint scanner.
Because the screen is so wide and has such a high resolution, it takes more than two full sweeps of the touchpad to get all the way from the left to the right edge; as a result, we often found the FineTrack button to be a more effective way of controlling the cursor.
Features
Our review sample of the TravelMate 6463WLMi runs Windows XP Pro, although it carries a sticker proclaiming 'Windows Vista Premium Ready' status. Its processor is an Intel Core 2 Duo T5500 running at 1.66GHz; this is supported by Intel's 945PM chipset and 1GB of DDR2 RAM, upgradeable to a maximum of 4GB.
Graphics are handled by ATI's Mobility Radeon X1300 GPU, which has 128MB of dedicated memory and can dynamically use up to a further 384MB of system memory as required. Your mobile data is entrusted to a shock-protected 80GB SATA hard drive spinning at 5400rpm.
Wireless connectivity comes courtesy of Intel’s PRO/Wireless 3945ABG Wi-Fi adapter and a Fast infrared (FIR) port. Bluetooth is an optional extra and was not installed on our review device. You also get wired networking via a Broadcom NetLink Gigabit Ethernet module.
The front of the casing house the infrared port and slider switches for toggling Bluetooth and Wi-Fi on and off. Both switches were present in our review device even though Bluetooth itself was not installed (you get on-screen ‘Enabled’ and ‘Disabled’ messages when using the wireless LAN toggle and a ‘No Bluetooth Device’ message when using the Bluetooth toggle. The front edge also houses microphone, line-in and headphone/speaker jacks.
The media bay on the right-hand side of the TravelMate 6463WLMi houses a Philips multi-format DVD rewriter; the only other item on this side is a single USB 2.0 port. The left-hand side has two further USB 2.0 connectors placed side by side and quite close together, so you may find it difficult to use both at the same time, depending on the peripheral you're attaching. There's also a FireWire (IEEE 1394) port, an ExpressCard/34 slot, a Type II PC Card slot and a SmartCard slot for system security when used with a smartcard. This busy are is completed by a flash memory card reader that accepts Memory Stick (and MS Pro), MultiMedia Card, SD and xD card media.
At the back, you'll find modem (RJ-11) and Ethernet (RJ-45) connectors, along with the mains power jack, VGA-Out, S-Video and DVI-D connectors and an old-fashioned 9-pin serial port.
Sitting in the lid section above the screen is Acer’s Orbicam, a 1.3-megapixel camera. This can be swivelled through 225 degrees, so it can easily point towards you for videoconferencing or away from you for image capture. The accompanying image capture software includes a face-tracking feature that worked reasonably well during testing. The camera was less impressive with a light source such as a window in the background, but performed fine in more evenly-lit conditions.
The Orbicam software is just one of a number of applications that Acer bundles with this notebook. GridVista, for example, can be used to automatically arrange application windows on-screen for maximum visibility, while the company’s Empowering Technology suite includes a number of settings and system management tools. If a fingerprint scanner is included, such as in our review model, appropriate software for managing fingerprint recognition is also included.
Conclusion
This is a large notebook whose screen and keyboard take full advantage of the space available. It's well stocked with ports and connectors both ancient (serial port) and modern (e.g. DVI-D, SmartCard and others). Placing easily accessible hardware controls for Bluetooth and Wi-Fi on the fascia is a sensible move. We are also pleased to see an integrated digital camera: video calling is an increasingly important business application, and it's much easier to be able to undertake a video call without having to carry an external camera.
This isn't a notebook you're likely to be carrying with you and using on your travels a great deal, but if you need to operate under battery power, Acer suggests the 8-cell main battery should provide 3.5 hours of life; adding a second 6-cell battery in the media bay should boost this to 5.5 hours, according to Acer.
The TravelMate 6463WLMi comes with a one-year International Travellers' warranty, which is on the short side for a business system. Telephone support for out-of-warranty products is only available between 9am and 5.30pm on weekdays, and costs 50p per minute. The company's online support could stand some sprucing up; it does offer easy driver and manual downloads plus email support, but lacks such helpful features as forums and real-time chat with a tech-support representative.
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