Acer's Crystal Eye webcam, which sits above the screen, is welcome -- but it's fixed rather than swivel-mounted, which would be preferable. The camera captures stills and video at 640x480 and 320x240 pixels. It functions adequately as far as it goes, but it lacks features such as the face-tracking functionality we saw in the Fujitsu Siemens LifeBook S6410.
The TravelMate 6592 is reasonably well kitted-out with ports and connectors. However, there are only three USB 2.0 ports, two side-by-side on the left edge, and one at the back on the right. The left-hand side also houses a FireWire (IEEE 1394) port, an ExpressCard/54 slot, a PC Card slot, a SmartCard reader and a flash card reader that accepts SD, MMC, Memory Stick and xD media.
At the back, you'll find S-Video, DVI-D, VGA and serial ports, along with modem (RJ-11) and Ethernet (RJ-45) connectors and the power jack. The front houses microphone, headphone and line-out jacks and the infrared port. There are also two mechanical slider buttons here: one toggles Wi-Fi on and off, the other Bluetooth. It's unusual and welcome to see the two wireless radios controllable by separate hardware switches.
Performance
The TravelMate 6592 is a comfortable
laptop to work with, both in terms of general responsiveness and as far
as the keyboard is concerned. We would have liked a higher-resolution
screen, though, and also feel that Acer could do more with its webcam.
Upping the camera resolution, including automatic light metering and
adding face tracking would all help.
Acer says the standard six-cell battery will deliver 2.5 hours of life. You can extend this to 4.5 hours by adding an optional second battery in the media bay. Alternatively, an eight-cell main battery pack will deliver a claimed 4 hours' life with another 2 hours available from a second battery in the media bay.
We ran Battery Eater to test the life of the laptop with just the standard battery fitted, which resulted in 1 hour 56 minutes of life. We suspect that with a less graphics-intensive set of processes running, you may well get the 2.5 hours that Acer claims.
Conclusion
The Acer TravelMate 6592 is an affordable
laptop that should suit anyone looking for a capable, mostly
desk-bound, system. Although it's fairly basic, the webcam is a handy
extra, while fingerprint recognition is fast becoming a 'must-have'
feature for business users.
Edited by Charles McLellan
Additional editing by Nick Hide
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