Review As the dust settles on the Intel Centrino Duo launch, several machines based on the new technology have started to appear on the market. After the Acer TravelMate 8204WLMi our second Centrino Duo laptop comes from a UK company - not what you expect when you have massive players like Dell, IBM and HP on the case. The Voyager C550 is rather cunningly based on an established Asus chassis and this is why Evesham has a product available so soon after the launch...

If you want all the technical details about the new platform, take a look at the Acer review as it covers everything the new Centrino Duo platform has to offer. The Voyager C550 isn't as highly specified as the 8204WLMi, but it costs a lot less as a result. The processor is an Intel Core Duo T2400 clocked at 1.83GHz, offering not only a decent speed also the best price:performance value in the Core Duo range, since it costs considerably less than the 2GHz T2500 used in the Acer.

With 1GB of 667MHz DDR 2 memory and a 100GB 7,200rpm SATA hard drive, the base specs are very good indeed. Add to this an ATI Mobility Radeon X1600 graphics chip with 256MB of memory and you get close to a desktop spec laptop. Besides the slower CPU and more modest memory complement, the Voyager C550's specification is quite similar to the Acer's. It does of course use the same Intel ProWireless 3945ABG 802.11a/b/g wireless card, as this is part of the new Centrino standard. Bluetooth 2.0 is also part of the package.

The DVD writer is from LG and handles all types of writeable DVD media. It will write to DVD±R media at 8x, DVD±RW at 4x, DVD±R Dual Layer at 2.4x and DVD-RAM at 5x. In terms of design the Voyager C550 looks almost identical to the Asus A6Km-Q002H, which isn't bad but definitely not as stylish as the carbon fibre-finished Acer.