Acer TravelMate 290 Review

The Acer TravelMate 290 series is one of the most handsome, versatile, and long-lasting budget laptops on the market. It comes with Intel Centrino technology and costs as little as AU$2499 for the bare-bones configuration, though we recommend a few upgrades; the price difference to add a DVD burner to the Acer TravelMate 290 battery is pretty good value for a notebook. While the price may say mainstream notebook, many of the features scream thin-and-light laptop. For instance, you can swap media modules in the TravelMate 290 series, which you can't do with most mainstream notebooks. It also achieved extra-long battery life in our Labs' drain tests. Despite a few design letdowns, students and families on tight budgets should give it serious consideration.

Editor's Note: The Acer Travelmate tested here varies ever so slightly from the locally available version; in the US the memory specification drops to 128MB and various hard drive sizes are available.
Although the Acer TravelMate 290 series falls into the mainstream category, the laptop's case measures a trim 3.2cm and weighs 2.8kg (3.2kg with the AC adapter). The chassis is 33.2cm wide by 27.4 inches deep, making room for a 14-inch screen in a purplish-silvery, titanium-alloy lid. The dark-grey, plastic base features a rubber shock absorber directly under the hard drive. The well-designed lid latch opens easily with one hand.

Acer's big keyboard is a letdown. Unlike the mildly U-shaped, hand-friendly keyboards found on other Acer notebooks, the TravelMate 290 battery features a straight one. It operates quietly, but it sags under pressure and gives poor feedback. The important keys are large, as you'd expect for the chassis size, and the touchpad is also spacious and smooth, with two mouse buttons below it. (There's no pointing stick.)

Icons and text appeared nice and big when displayed at the screen's native resolution of 1,024x768, but colours looked a bit washed out, especially reds and yellows. DVD movies surprised us when they made a slightly jerky start, even at two-thirds screen. Speaking of DVD movies, they load easily into the front-loading DVD drive HP Pavilion dv8000 battery. The swappable media bay can also hold a DVD-R/-RW burner, a rare option on a budget notebook. Stereo speakers at the left and right corners of the front edge sound raspy when turned up high, but at a reasonable office volume, they play speech and music clearly.

The TravelMate 290 offers plenty of ports and slots for the average user. It features three USB 2.0 ports, a single Type II PC Card slot, four-pin FireWire, parallel, Ethernet, modem, VGA/video-out, and S-Video-out ports. There's no built-in floppy drive, but you can attach an external floppy via USB.

The notebook ships with either the Windows XP Home or the XP Professional operating system. You also get a healthy mix of additional software, including Norton AntiVirus, Adobe Acrobat Reader, CyberLink PowerDVD XP 4.0, and NTI CD-Maker 6.0.

The Acer TravelMate 290 is the fastest 1.3GHz Pentium M-based system we've tested yet, easily beating its closest competitor. The Intel 82852 GME Extreme Graphics Controller shares system memory, but surprisingly, this architecture did not hurt performance as much as we've seen in the past. Acer configured the TravelMate 290LMi so that its processor would not throttle down too much, giving it a performance edge. When it comes to office and content-creation apps, the dell xps m1730 battery is one of the best mobile performers in its class.

In battery tests, the Acer TravelMate 290LMi lasted more than five hours, placing second to the IBM Thinkpad R40, but still in a very healthy spot. The system owes its great battery life to its power-efficient Pentium M processor and 14.8V, 4,300mAh (64WHr) battery. The IBM ThinkPad R40 came in first place using the same 1.3GHz Pentium M processor as the battery for TravelMate 290 and a less powerful 14.4V, 4,000mAh (58WHr) battery. Acer has once again achieved the elusive balance of great performance and long battery life when running office and content-creation apps.