Not all slim and light laptops come off the conveyor belt bursting with sex appeal. Take the Acer TravelMate 6293: Battery life, it has in spades. Everything else? Not so much. This entirely black portable is fairly well packaged as far as all-purpose laptops go, but if this machine were to go on a diet and lose 0.6 pounds, it could qualify as a good deal for an ultraportable. No doubt Acer's goal was to cut corners--and some standard notebook connections--to a hit a palatable $999 price point, perfectly acceptable for a business budget. But the result is a laptop that's a tad frumpy.
Don't get me wrong--performance-wise, the TravelMate 6293 rocks. Its battery life is Energizer Bunny amazing. Equipped with a powerful 7200-mAh battery, the laptop lasted 3 minutes shy of 8 hours in our tests. Just stick this baby in a backpack or briefcase and walk out the door declaring Outlet Freedom Day. The results are far better than what we've seen from any other all-purpose portable on the scene. Heck, because of its diminutive size, we were this close to comparing it with a Lenovo ThinkPad X200.
The speed of the TravelMate 6293 is good, too, though not quite as breathtaking. The 2.26-GHz Core 2 Duo P8400-equipped unit with 2GB of RAM turned in a pretty impressive WorldBench 6 score of 90, so it should be able to handle any type of work swiftly, limited only by the shared video memory. Lack of a dedicated graphics card is an unfortunate characteristic of small laptops that effectively eliminates gaming; the memory is just too sparse to support 3D shooters with fancy shading.
Of course, small screens don't lend themselves to entertainment, either, but the 12.1-inch, 1280-by-800-pixel, wide-aspect display is fine for any other job you care to squeeze into those small quarters. It's crisp, reasonably bright, and glossy, but it won't hurt your eyes under office lights.
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