Acer TravelMate 8472T: An Affordable Business Laptop

Recently, Acer launched its latest lineup of business notebooks, the TravelMate series. There are various models targeting different budgets and the price range starts from Rs 23,999 +taxes. Click here to see the full press release and the models available. Touted as ultra-slim, portable and with ultra-long battery life, these notebooks seem quite promising. Today we have with us the TravelMate 8472T, which is quite impressive especially considering that it’s a business laptop with mainstream hardware at the price of an entry-level laptop. Now, let’s see what it really offers.

Design
Similar to most business laptops, especially the ThinkPads, the TravelMate too has an all-black matte body. Although it might not look that rugged, it has a rock-solid shell and looks good too. A scratch-resistant body, large and well-spaced keys, light-weight form factor and excellent battery backup are features that one expects from a good business laptop. And, that’s exactly what you get with this machine but before we move on to how well it performs, let’s take a look at the design and features.

What goes without saying is that, the all-black theme looks sober and is apt for business people. The slim lid is plain black matte with just a metallic Acer logo at the top-right corner. Even the chassis, wrist rest and screen frame have the exact same look and finish. Overall, it’s a good looking and sturdy machine, despite of being slim and light in light in weight. Ergonomically, there’s nothing to complain about whatsoever, typing is comfortable and the touchpad and buttons are good too.

Features
The features and hardware of this laptop are typical of business machines, for instance, there’s no discrete graphics, it has ample storage space, a very good keyboard, and, you’ll even find a finger print scanner between the two mouse buttons. Built around an Intel HM 55 chipset, this laptop is powered by an Intel Core i5 430M CPU which is clocked at 2.27 GHz and has 3 MB L3 cache. There’s 4 GB RAM, a 500 GB hard drive, Intel HD graphics and the matte screen is 14 inches with the common native resolution of 1366 x 768. So, as you can see, it’s a proper business machine with features that suffice for the intended purpose. Also it weighs merely 2.4 kg, so carrying it is not a pain in the neck, literally.

Other standard features include three USB and a VGA port, a dial-up modem, a DVD-writer, a memory card reader, audio jacks and a webcam. What’s missing is an HDMI port and keeping in mind that most mainstream laptops have it, we’re considering it a downside for this laptop. On a side note, I like the Launch Manager button next to the power switch, push it, and you have a host of applications to choose from. You can even add other frequently used applications.

Onward, our test unit came with a 6-cell battery and we got whopping battery life. Finally the machine comes preloaded with Windows 7 Professional (32 bit).