Sneak Peek

People these days look for ultra portable laptops. These laptops are very useful and popular with people who have to travel frequently and to do a lot of office work on the move. Acer has introduced 12" laptop TravelMate 6291 with low price. This laptop looks a bit bland in appearance and hence it gives it a look of a business laptop. Its 2.04 kg weight makes it a little heavy for an ultra portable, but it does have a built-in optical drive. With the help of technologies ultra portables in the 2-3 kg weight class are getting cheaper these days, and they're getting ever smaller.

Key Features

Acer has done a very good job while integrating its features. The best thing is the built-in dual-layer DVD burner. Though it could have easily placed a DVD/CD-RW drive, instead it came up with the DVD burner. Another thing to notice over here is that it has three USB ports and a FireWire port. In most of the ultra portables you will only find two USB ports. It's one of the few ultra portables that has both S-Video-out and VGA-out. Acer TravelMate 6291 has also put in a line-out port for external speakers because the integrated speaker is not too impressive. Acer is one of the vendors that don't seem to favor cellular modems. But if it could have added it as an option then it would have been good.

Design

The frame of Acer TravelMate 6291 is made-up of magnesium alloy. This lightweight yet tough and cost effective metal is becoming a hot favorite among most of the PC makers. The screen of 6291 is 12". With a widescreen, Acer has also fit in a full-size keyboard. The Enter key is two-thirds the size of a typical one and the Arrow keys are also not too big, but the Backspace and Shift keys are a bit shrunken. The mouse button of 6291 is also quite noisy.

Core Information

The memory of Acer TravelMate 6291 is a bit disappointing. Windows Vista can not run properly on just 1GB of RAM.

The most terrible thing about the 6291's performance is its battery life. It lasts only for an hour and a half after playing a DVD movie, and that's simply not enough, even if how easy on the pocket the system is.

Conclusion

The Acer TravelMate 6291 is an eye-catching business laptop that gives you both marvelous portability and an exceptional price. It's customized to businesses that have limited funds and to employees who primarily answer a lot of e-mail and work with Microsoft Office. With the exception of the battery life, most of the performance drawbacks can be covered up by a simply upgrading the RAM.