TravelMate 3010

Good things do come in small packages, at least in the case of Acer's TravelMate 3010, which has all you need for a reasonable price. It's lightweight (1.6kg without power supply and with standard battery) but sturdy, though the screen displayed some distortion when flexed. Contrast levels weren't great on the 12.1in (1280x800) screen, especially from angles, but otherwise fine to view.

It comes with Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, easy navigation buttons and a screen-mounted 1.3Mp (megapixel) camera that swivels 180 degrees. It also has a cleverly designed 5-in-1 media card reader that takes up one card slot. The TravelMate 3010 also manages to accommodate a wide range of ports. The unit's small form factor is aided by the exclusion of an internal optical drive. However, a FireWire connected Super-Multi DVD-RW (dual-layer) is included.

The unit scored well in our WorldBench 5 benchmark, achieving above average results in many tests. The overall result of 81 was good for an Intel 1.66GHz Core Duo CPU with only 512MB of RAM (533MHz) and an Intel 945GM graphics chipset. Unfortunately, the smaller (3-cell, 200g) battery that came with our unit was faulty, but we ran MobileMark 2002 on the supplied larger (6-cell, 350g) battery which lasted 210mins, while our worst case scenario test (playing a DVD) lasted 138mins.