Review Acer must be making life very difficult for other notebook manufacturers. The company has built a solid reputation for manufacturing high-quality portables at very attractive prices, and the TravelMate 8104WLMi is no exception, writes Riyad Emeran.

The 8104WLMi is Acer's first 'Sonoma' notebook, and it's a pretty good first effort. The brushed silver finish is a bit samey these days, but it still looks good - having the Acer logo placed in the corner of the lid rather than the middle is also commendably different. With dimensions of 36.3 x 26.6 x 3.4cm and a weight of 2.8kg, the 8104WLMi just about falls into the portable notebook category. It doesn't feel like too much of a burden when carried around.

Opening the lid reveals Acer's trademark curved keyboard. Some people hate them, but I quite like the curve. The action of the keyboard is pretty good, although not up to the standard of an IBM ThinkPad - is anything? There's a little flex in the keyboard when typing at speed, but not enough to be annoying. The travel on each key is long enough, and the break and spring back are both well weighted. To be honest, though, I can't be too critical of the keyboard since this is a pre-production sample.

Below the spacebar is a large touchpad, presented in a widescreen aspect ratio to match the screen. There are two selector buttons, along with a scroll button. As touchpads go, there's nothing wrong with this one, although I wish that Acer would go down the trackpoint route.

Acer has pushed the boat out when it comes to the screen. The 15.4in widescreen display has a resolution of 1680 x 1050 which gives you more display real estate than most desktop screens do. You can never have too much screen acreage, and working with the Acer is a joy, especially if you need to have multiple windows open all the time.

But since this is a Sonoma notebook, much of the interesting stuff is under the hood. Beating at the heart of the 8104WLMi is a 2GHz Pentium M CPU, backed up by 1GB of 533MHz DDR 2 memory. The PCI Express support in Sonoma is highlighted by the inclusion of a 128MB ATI Mobility Radeon X700, one of the fastest mobile graphics chips available outside desktop replacement notebooks. The faster Mobility Radeon X800 and Nvidia GeForce Go 6800 chips require significant cooling and power, so appear only in large, deskbound machines.

Acer has decided not to make use of Sonoma's Serial ATA support, and installed an Ultra ATA hard disk instead. That said, it is a 100GB drive, so it should keep even the most space-hungry user happy. If you do want to offload some data it won't be too much a problem - Acer has also included a DVD writer which will burn to DVD+R/RW, DVD-R/RW, DVD-RAM and CD-R/RW.

Being a Centrino-branded notebook, there's also an Intel wireless networking card installed with support for 802.11a/b/g. If you prefer to connect to your network the old fashioned way, Acer has this well covered with the inclusion of a Gigabit Ethernet controller. There's a 56Kbps modem included too, but more important is the integrated Bluetooth, so you can get online using your mobile phone.

Having a look around the chassis, you'll see that the DVD writer dominates the right-hand side, alongside three USB 2.0 ports. The front is pretty stacked with features: there are switches for both the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth radios and a memory card reader that accepts SD, MMC, MemoryStick and XD cards. You'll also find microphone and headphone sockets, the latter doubling as an S/PDIF port. There's an infrared port too.

The left side is populated with a single Type II PC Card slot and a SmartCard slot for added security. Acer will supply two SmartCards in the box with the machine, with one being a master card for creating copies. There's no sign of an Express Card slot, but since there aren't any Express Card peripherals available yet, that's not a problem. Also on the left is a four-pin FireWire port, another USB 2.0 port, modem socket, network connector and a D-SUB port.

At the rear is a bit of a surprise: there's a DVI-D port to complement the D-SUB port. This means that you can make use of the ATI DualView feature on the Radeon X700 and drive two external monitors. There's also an S-Video output at the rear along with a docking connector.

Performance wise, the Acer is seriously quick. The SYSmark 2002 score of 292 is way up there with the fastest Centrino notebooks we've seen, while the 3D scores are equally impressive. Running 3Dmark03 returned a score of 6151, while 2374 in 3Dmark05 is also pretty good for a Pentium M-based notebook. Both Far Cry and Doom 3 turned in scores of over 30fps at 1024 x 768 - 36fps and 34.2fps, respectively. But if Half-Life 2 is your game of choice, while you'll be more than happy with the 66.7fps score at 1024 x 768, you'll have to have anisotropic filtering and full-screen anti-aliasing turned off.

The battery life isn't astounding, but three hours isn't terrible, especially when the Acer turned in a MobileMark performance rating of 256.

Acer has produced a good looking, very well featured and extremely fast notebook, so you'd expect to be paying through the nose for it right? Wrong. Amazingly, the TravelMate 8104WLMi will only set you back £1419 including VAT, while the range starts at only £1069.

Verdict

A well-designed, very fast notebook with a great screen and tonnes of features - what more could you ask for? The Acer TravelMate 8104WLMi is an excellent machine and a bargain. I'd be tempted to go for the slightly lower spec 8103WLMi and save some cash, but ultimately it looks like the TravelMate 8100 series is going to be a hard act to beat.

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