Acer TravelMate C110 Tablet PC

This Centrino-based Tablet PC from Acer is powered by a Pentium M 900MHz processor and packs 512 MB DDR

RAM.Add to this a 40 GB hard disk and a swiveling LCD display, and you have a good deal. In SiSoft Sandra, the processor scored 2981 MIPS/1203 FLOPS on arithmetic testing. In iSSE multimedia benchmarks, it came out at 5115 it/s (integer mode) and 5934 it/s (floating point mode). This is as good as a P IV 1.2GHz processor. Our unit scored 63.9 Winstone units in Content Creation Winstone 2001.

The 10.5” display is big enough for reading e-books and taking notes on the move. Out of the box, the system supports a maximum resolution of 1024x768 at 32-bit color depth. You have the option to connect an external monitor through the rear-access VGA port. Quake III Arena gave us a frame rate of 44.2 fps. Considering its onboard Intel graphics controller with just 8 MB RAM, this is quite good.

It comes with an amazing assortment of strategically placed ports. Two USB 2.0 ports, a FireWire port, a phone jack, an RJ45 jack, a VGA port and a “replicator” port which allows you to connect as many more ports as you want more than satisfy these needs. There is also an IR port at the front edge. When we placed a Nokia 6210 mobile phone in front of it, it detected it instantly. The built-in 802.11b wireless card can enabled using a simple button. This 11 Mb/sec card gives you reasonable transfer speeds on a shared network. Bundled with the basic hardware unit is an extra battery, a DVD/CD-Writer combo unit (FireWire), and software CDs.

The thoughtfully provided restore CDs are quite intuitive to use–just boot off the CD marked “bootable” and it automatically asks you for the other CDs as well. There is also an OEM copy of Norton Antivirus. This is, however, not installed by default.

It shows an install shortcut on the desktop. A whopping selection of software like various readers, planners and CD -creation software come preinstalled. It runs on the Win XP Tablet PC Edition, with service pack 1 installed.

A good attraction is the write-to-type stylus powered interface even though the thin girth stylus can be a bottleneck. However, since the small and strangely curved keyboard and a touch pad and four-way scroll button are equally tiresome, you will find yourself quickly braving hand cramps to use the stylus. Handwriting recognition is superb, with it recognizing even extremely bad drunken scrawls!

As for battery power, it lasted for only about two and a half hours, though we would normally expect a Centrino device to run for about four hours. Amazingly though, charging takes just under fifteen minutes. Another disappointment was the feeble output from the built-in speakers. But, you do have the option of plugging in external speakers to the audio jacks along the right-edge. There is also a microphone on it, which we didn’t discover till we saw the tiny hole near the IR port.

The Bottom Line A good buy for the configuration and its price.

S N A P S H O T
Price	:	Rs 149,990 (one-year international travel warranty)
Meant for	:	Mobile professionals
Key specs	:	Pentium M 900 MHz, 512MB DDR-RAM, External DVDR/CDW Combo (FireWire), 802.11b WiFi
Pros	:	Lightweight, good human interface, ample resources
Cons	:	Very thin stylus, battery drain, bad speakers
Contact	:	Acer India, Bangalore.
Tel	:	5219520.
E-mail	:	diptarup_chakraborti@acer.co.in

Sujay Sarma