Acer TravelMate 8215WLMi review

The 15.4-inch WSXGA+ LCD is capable of 1,680x1,050-pixel resolution, which is good enough to get some pretty good results from DVD movies but not quite up to the job when it comes to watching 1080p Blu-ray flicks. This is a shame, especially considering Sony's excellent 17-inch Vaio VGN-AR11S is 1080p-capable. To get the most of Blu-ray you'll need to connect the laptop to an external display with a DVI input port.
 

Here's why you're paying all that money -- the Blu-ray drive lets you watch super high-quality video, but you'll need an external screen

 
Acer has missed a trick by using Windows XP Professional Edition instead of the more suitable Windows XP Media Center Edition (MCE). They have pretty-much identical features, but MCE would have enabled users to get easier access to their multimedia files. However, there is some consolation in the fact you get a free upgrade to Windows Vista Business when it becomes available.

Other notable features include a bundled VoIP phone. This is tucked away inside the ExpressCard slot on the laptop's left side and can either be removed and used just like an ordinary handset, or act as a speakerphone for conference calling. With it, you can make free or super-cheap voice calls via the Internet -- a nice touch.
 

The bundled VoIP phone lets you make cheap calls via the Internet

 
Performance
The most important question people are probably asking here is 'what's the Blu-ray performance like?' Since you're spending £300 for the technology it's a perfectly fair question -- and the answer is... not bad. But it's not perfect either. Our review sample seemed to struggle, occasionally dropping frames. Acer says this shouldn't happen, and it'll be sending us a replacement 8215WLMi for evaluation. We'll update this review as soon as we complete secondary tests.

Elsewhere it's worth noting that the combination of a power processor combined with a mid-range graphics card did rear its head with the benchmarking. The 8215WLMi scored just 2,058 in 3DMark 2006 at 1,280x1,024-pixel resolution, which is nearly 30 per cent slower than Sony's VGN-AR11S. PC Mark 05 hit a very respectable 4,630 though, so you'll have few worries about feeding the laptop complicated (non-gaming) tasks.

It's worth noting here that the PCMark component scores confirmed that the rip-roaring CPU was more than holding up to its end of the bargain, supported ably by the memory, but unfortunately let down primarily by the graphics card and a rather average hard drive speed.

Edited by Rory Reid
Additional editing by Nick Hide