Acer Travelmate TM8372T Notebook Review

Editor's Score
Features:	Performance:
Value:
The Verdict: Although slightly heavy, this Travelmate provides zippy performance and great battery life at a reasonable price

Historically, Acer has generally been associated with a value line-up- with the occasional Ferrari model. However, recent Acer products have certainly shown a lot of pizazz. The Travelmate TM8372T notebook that we’re looking at today is one such product with a brushed aluminium lid and rigidly constructed body that feels and looks impressive. Packaged with the quint-essential power adapter and a cleaning cloth, lets find out more about the Acer Travelmate TM8372T.

Based on the Intel Core i5 M520 CPU running at 2.40GHz along with 4GB DDR3 RAM, the Acer Travelmate TM8372T is reasonably speedy for all your daily tasks. For powering up the 13.3″ display with a 1366×768 resolution, Acer uses the integrated Intel HD graphics controller which is good enough for every day tasks such as using the Internet, working on documents and watching videos, however, don’t expect it to run the latest games. For storage, Acer uses a 320GB Seagate hard drive while connectivity is covered through an 802.11b/g/n based Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 3.0. Yes, you read right- that is Bluetooth 3.0, however, sadly we dont have any Bluetooth devices to test this out with.

Although the Travelmate TM8372T is a good looking notebook, it is not necessarily the sleekest or the lightest notebook we’ve tested. It measures 323.6 x 234 x 30.5 and weighs 2.1kg. On the left you have the power connector as well as two USB ports, VGA output and Acer’s Easy port IV port replicator connector. The front takes our SD/Memory card along with audio input and output whereas the right side houses the DVD writer, the wired network socket and an additional USB port. Surprisingly, there is no webcam on this model which could actually be an advantage to certain businesses.

Usability-wise, the Acer Travelmate TM8372T is pretty good. We’ve already mentioned that the construction quality is impressive- this notebook feels like it will survive a fall or two without much issues. The keys on the keyboard are pretty big and easy to type, however, I’m not a big fan of an extra column of keys on the right of the the backspace/enter keys. The track-pad is a bit on the smaller side but quite precise in tracking the mouse movements along with supporting multi-touch for an Apple like two-finger scrolling experience. As with most screens we’ve tested, the Acer Travelmate TM8372T has decent viewing angles horizontally but not that great vertically. It does have pretty loud speakers though so if you’re looking for a notebook that makes a lot of noise, then this would be it.

Lets look at the performance numbers posted by the Acer Travelmate TM8372T. For comparison, we have benchmarked it against some of the recently tested Core i5 based notebooks such as the Lenovo Edge and Sony Z11 in areas like CPU (WinRAR), 3D Graphics (3D Mark ’06), Hard Disk (Performance Test 7) and Overall Performance (PC Mark Vantage).

From the results above, you can see that the Acer Travelmate TM8372T isn’t very fast in 3D because of its integrated graphics controller, however, it manages to hold up well under CPU and Overall tests. The RAID0 SSD found in the Sony Z117 makes it insanely fast in disk based benchmarks and thus, overall system performance.

Finishing off, the battery life on the Acer Travelmate TM8372T turned out to be quite impressive. We managed to get almost seven hours out of the 8-cell extended battery included in the packaging. There weren’t any noise or heat issues with the Acer Travelmate TM8372T with the unit running fairly quietly, even with benchmarks running and never too hot.

Priced at AED 3,300 (US$ 899), the Acer Travelmate TM8372T is decently priced for its specifications and quality. We recommend it.