The keyboards of the notebooks have a curious bow-like shape, emphasized by the bezel that smoothes sharp corners out. The full-size keys are made of black plastic (the top row of functional keys has a reduced size); the numeric pad and two Windows keys are here, too, like in an ordinary desktop keyboard. The letters are labeled in white, and the functional keys in blue (press and hold [Fn] to use them). A few useful keyboard shortcuts are available: Fn+F6 turns the screen off to save the battery charge; Fn+F7 disables/enables the touchpad to avoid accidental touches as you’re typing text; Fn+F8 mutes or enables the sound. The cursor-controlling keys are not quite handy as the Arrow Left and Arrow Right keys have a small size and there are Page Up/Home and Page Down/End buttons on the sides that can be accidentally pressed on. But this is a minor drawback – they keyboard is really ergonomic and convenient overall.

The touchpad repeats the keyboard’s design with its rounded corners and frame. The frame is wider on the TravelMate 6003LCi and the useful area of the touchpad is thus reduced. Besides the two standard buttons that replace the mouse’s buttons, the two notebooks have an oval-shaped four-position joystick for vertical and horizontal scroll.

The 15” screens of both notebooks have a maximum resolution of 1400x1050; the screens are bright, with good color reproduction and viewing angles. The screen brightness is controlled with functional keys. When adjusting the brightness, there’s no scale or other indication of the current brightness level, which is rather inconvenient (but such a scale does appear when you’re adjusting the sound volume). The brightness range is not too big; you can conformably read something at the minimal setting.

At the front panel of the Acer TravelMate 803LCi, besides the display latch, there’s a Bluetooth connection button, a WLAN InviLink button, an IrDA port, and two speakers on the sides. The 6003LCi model also features a card-reader that supports Smart Media, Memory Stick, MultiMediaCard, and Secure Digital formats.

At the left panels of the reviewed notebooks you can find the following:

• 4 USB ports;
• 1 IEEE 1394 port;
• PC Card slot (for cards type II);
• Smart card reader;
• Lin-in;
• Mic-in;
• Line-out.

As I described in my article called Two Office Notebooks: ASUS M6B00N and Acer TravelMate 803 LCi,  the settings written on the smart card and accompanying software (PlatinumPas, PlatinumSecure, PlatinumKey) allow organizing a multi-tier security system around the notebook.

PlatinumPas is the first tier as it starts up before the BIOS POST procedure (if the smart card is not inserted, the notebook will not boot up). PlatinumSecure enhances the Windows XP logon procedure on the OS level. It offers user authorization, encryption/decryption services (except system files, subfolders and files encrypted with other programs) and protection against unauthorized access. The PlatinumKey program is employed to store passwords on the smart card and to automatically confirm the password at Web sites that require authentication.