Acer TravelMate 3002WTCi

For road warriors who need all the processing power and battery life they can get in a travel-friendly package, there’s no better deal than the Acer TravelMate 3002WTCi. For $1,299, this ultraportable delivers snappy performance along with nearly five hours of endurance using the included six-cell battery. Throw in Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, USB and FireWire, a memory card reader, and an external optical drive and you have one of the best values we’ve seen this year.

 

Weighing a very svelte 3.1 pounds, the TravelMate 3002WTCi is light and thin enough to slip into a backpack or briefcase. The included six-cell battery ups the weight from 3.1 pounds to a still very manageable 3.9 pounds and hangs off the back of the system a bit. The back is pretty bare of ports, with the exception of a connector for Acer’s optional ezDock docking station.

 

On the right side of the system there are three USB ports, a six-pin FireWire port that powers the external DVD/CD-RW drive, and an SD/MMC/Memory Stick Reader. The left side has two more USB ports, Ethernet and modem jacks, plus a VGA connection. Acer placed the mic and headphone jacks up front along with an infrared window and two dedicated On/Off buttons for the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth radios.

 

This slim but fast notebook is built around a 1.73-GHz Intel Pentium M 740 processor that offers 2MB of integrated cache memory and a 533-MHz system bus. With 512MB of DDR22 533 memory, the system flew through every application we threw its way, from Photoshop CS to Windows Media Player. The 3002WTCi registered an outstanding MobileMark score of 231.

 

The system offers fairly good gaming performance behind the Intel 915GM core logic chipset’s integrated video adapter. You won’t want to play the latest 3D games on it at high detail settings, but at lower resolution it offers fine performance. 3Dmark2001 backed up our opinion with a score of 4,918.

 

The system’s hard disk performance wasn’t great and its 4,200-rpm hard drive is a bit slow to load applications, but it offers a generous 60GB of storage.

 

Complementing the hard disk is an external DVD-ROM/CD-RW drive. If nothing else, it matches the sleek design of the 3002WTCi. This drive connects to the system and draws all of the power it needs through a six-pin powered FireWire port.

 

The 3002WTCi features a 12.1-inch widescreen display. Its WXGA resolution makes each pixel small enough to warrant zooming your Word docs up to 150 percent or higher. This screen is perfect for watching a DVD. The preinstalled Acer Arcade utility provides an easy-to-use interface for watching movies or viewing digital photo albums.

 

With its standard three-cell battery, the 3002WTCi barely has enough battery power to get through a DVD movie before it gives up the ghost. We recommend plugging in the six-cell battery, which offers nearly five hours of runtime on a charge.

 

For everyday use, you’ll appreciate the roomy keyboard. There is a four-way scroll pad between the touchpad’s buttons, but the touchpad itself doesn’t feature the same wide aspect ratio as the screen, making cursor navigation slightly unintuitive. We were disappointed not to find hardware-based security features on the system.

 

Another great feature of the 3002WTCi is the range of its built-in 802.11b/g Wi-Fi adapter, which is the first one we’ve ever tested that actually offered better wireless performance at 50 feet from our access point than it did from 5 feet. Its average throughput of 14.3 Mbps at 50 feet is about twice what most notebooks offer.

 

The integrated Bluetooth connection, which has its own power button next to the Wi-Fi button on the front of the system, is another welcome addition. Among other things, this technology connects a Bluetooth cell phone as a wireless modem, as well as a wireless headset for making VoIP calls.

 

The performance, portability, and features of the 3002WTCi make it an excellent buy if you’re a frequent traveler. As long as you don’t need an optical drive built in, there are few better ultraportable options at this price.