Acer Travelmate 8216

(Sorry it's an 8215 not 8216, 8216 doesn't exist, i think!)

Have just bought the above. I like the keyboard - easy to type, the casing - soft and elegant (the lid shouldn't scuff as it's glassy carbon fibre coated and the inside shouldn't show scratches as it's dark not silver), the easy to use orbicam, the acergrid vista software - useful for reading a doc and typing one at the same time.

The build quality is great - feels like it was built to last. The keyboard is robust and feels like it could take alot of pounding, unlike others I have used. None of the build quality compromises its beauty, style and elegance.

Ths screen is bright and vibrant with excellent contrast. The 'glass' in front of the screen is matte not shiny, so you won't get glare off lights being reflected back at you in the 'glass'. The screen is very bright, and you fortunately can turn it down if you need to give your eyes a rest by using the hot keys.

The fan is very quiet in normal applications, almost non existant. No over- heating any where. The fan blows mainly out of the right hand side, so no overheating if sitting on your lap in normal applications.

I like the fact that the optical bay is 'hot swappable' - you can take it out and exchange it for a blue-ray one if you like, or put another battery pack in there to take battery power up to 4.5 hours. Or you can remove OB to save weight.

At under 3kg it's fairly portable. There is 'gravi sense' and hard drive protection. It has been throroughly tested - for hinge test mean time between failure, dust, static, drop test etc...so it should last a fairly long time! Acer have reputation for being more reliable than some other leading brands, I think.

The screen resolution is 1680x1050, this is fairly high definition meaning you can see things eg photo's in great detail. It also makes the text smaller but very clear, meaning you can see more on your page. So if you are looking at two docs at the same time this makes it easier. People who are normally used to larger text may find this takes some time to get used to.

It has loads of great features - just about everything anyone could ever want! Acer seem to have put alot of thought into designing this laptop.
All the ports and features are in the right place.

High specs including 160GB hard drive making it fairly future proof (as most things are easily upgradable apart from hard drive).

The only thing I don't like is the fact that it's widescreen - this distorts text and photos as they are stretched across the screen.

Apart from that it's a great laptop!

 

Which of the three part numbers do you have?

LX.TEG06.038
LX.TEH06.063
LX.TEH06.069


Does your LCD have any light leakage? Also, did your system come with the ViOP phone?

 

I have the LX.TEH06.056. Light leakage? Do you mean if the screen was say blue, there would be a band of lighter blue at the bottom? I don't have any light leakage, if that if what you mean. Laptop arrived in perfect condtion. I don't have the phone included, another poerson on this forum said that it was missing so I think is an optional extra, but I will ring up the company who sold it to me and ask....but yes from the way they advertise it does sound like it comes with the phone. I think maybe the advert is misleading? Let me know if you find out about the phone.

 

I guess the LX.TEH06.056 is a UK model.

This is light leakage:



Mine wasn't as bad as above, but close. You notice it the most when the screen is black or dark.

 

No my screen is in perfect condition, no light leakage. That screen doesn't look great tho'. Is your laptop still under warranty?

 

The picture above isn’t from my laptop. Its from someone else’s on this site. But my laptop did have a similar problem. I purchased a 3 year extended warranty but decided just to send it back to the company that I purchased it from to get a replacement. I have been waiting for over 1 month and still haven’t received my replacement!.

 

Great insight on the Travelmate. Ive personally liked this lappy
I believe there is an 8216 model which is the 8216WLHi - comes with a Blu-Ray drive standard.
Could you comment on the volume control bottons? If im not mistaken, there are no dedicated volume buttons and it uses the hotkeys (Fn + up/down). Does it work well while running say a movie or (not sure if you game) video game?
Congrats on ur new system

 

AP27: Any variation of the 8210 series has a Bluray drive.
Also, you are correct, there are no dedicated volume control buttons. To my knowledge, sometimes it poses a problem when playing games... you can't win 'em all.

 

Yes there are two versions of the 8215, one has blue ray the other doesn't. Personally, I opted not to have the one with blue-ray as it cost me £200 less. The volumn control uses hot keys as you say. According to the reviews I've read it's fantastic for gaming and beats of most of the competitors hands down in terms of bench marks. I have never tried gaming, but I'm going to try on this machine just to push it to it's potentual and see what it can do.