Product: Acer TravelMate 4000 Price: $9,972 upwards Pros: Nicely constructed, power-packed features with built-in wireless and fast-speed connectivity. Long battery life Cons: Display quality is average. While the base price is low, once you add all the 'must-have' options, you are looking at about $16,000
The TravelMate 4000 is the first of Acer's Folio series of laptops, redesigned to lose the dull and corporate grey, product-line look prevalent in the old TravelMate series.
A well-constructed and high-performance piece of equipment, the TravelMate 4000 tips the scale at just under 3kg and has a price tag that is hard to resist.
Acer's new Folio design works. The 4000 features sleek lines, sculpted edges and comes in two metallic colours. It is a two-spindle design, offering hard disks of 40, 60 or 80 gigabytes.
While the company's press release calls it a new 'industrial' design, there is nothing to suggest it is especially long-lasting. The slim 4000 is optimised for portability, not ruggedness.
Built around the latest Intel Centrino technology with 512 megabytes of Ram as standard, the 4000 features a choice of CPU speeds with a Pentium M processor ranging between 1.5 and two gigahertz.
The laptop uses Intel's latest wireless module, the 802.11b and g PRO Wireless 2200 WLAN, which gives it 54 megabits per second data transmission speed.
