by Galina Sudareva
04/30/2004 | 12:11 PM
The ever-increasing tempo of modern life imposes its terms and conditions on us. We’re always running out of time – sometimes every minute is precious as gold – and this is where mobile devices enter the scene. Phones, PDAs, notebooks are now indispensable helpers of a business (I’d say digital) man and they will be only gaining their ground in the future.
<%BANNER[article]%>Work in some specialized field (medicine, inventory checking, presentations delivering, press conferences, inspections and so on) involves the use of portable PCs, which should be easy to handle both in office and in field conditions. Sometimes that’s not enough, though. The notebook should be designed in such a way as to offer you numerous functions, which you can use while holding the device in your hands (for example, it’s rather difficult to type in text quickly with only the fingers of one hand).
The recently-appeared tablet PCs with LCD sensor screens allow working without keyboard – they support handwrite input and make our life somewhat easier.
The Acer C111TCi is a curious engineering and designer solution, being a lucky mixture of a notebook and tablet. We were even more curious to test it, as it was the first tablet to come into our test lab.
The Acer C111TCi model comes accompanied with a small external power adapter, technical documentation, a user’s manual, a pack of drivers and utilities, a phone cable, an adapter, a stylus, a transportation cover, and a special napkin to wipe the notebook’s screen clean.
You also receive an external DVD/CD-RW drive with an external power adapter and a set of cables and an external FDD, so you don’t have to worry about purchasing them in the future.
The leather transportation cover is designed like a small folder with a pocket on the outside, into which you can put either a pen or the stylus (this cover is a handy and practical thing that helps to keep the C111TCi away from dust and dirt, scratches and “curious eyes”).
The software pack contains all necessary drivers and utilities, system restore programs and a disk with antivirus software.
The preinstalled software bundle needs a closer inspection. The operation system you see here is Windows XP Tablet PC Edition (English-language version), specifically tailored by Microsoft for tablet notebooks. It helps to use handwrite-input programs efficiently.
The Input Panel application serves for typing, transferring and recognizing text. It also simulates a virtual keyboard, necessary for the stylus.
The Windows Journal and the Sticky Notes (this program is a handy and efficient alternative to popular paper sticky notes) both support handwrite input, but only in English (a nice practice if your knowledge of the language needs improving).
The system can be restored from the hard disk drive for which purpose there’s a hidden partition with files. If you feel like using this restore function, press the F2 key for entering the BIOS and enable the “Boot from Hard Disk Recovery” option from the “Advanced” page. That’s all – you don’t have to seek for drivers or attach an external drive.
The elegant case of the Acer C111TCi certainly pleases the eye. It is dark-blue with light-blue metallic insertions – overall that’s a great-looking machine.
The top panel of the notebook can rotate along two axes (vertical and horizontal) and work in two modes: like a screen of a regular notebook or like one of a tablet PC. The display can only be rotated by 180° clockwise – rotating it otherwise you can damage it as the direction arrows on the LCD shaft indicate. The lid is fastened with two locks (the display remains locked fast when you use the device as a tablet).
There are five buttons at the display’s framing, which become accessible in the “tablet mode”: Enter (you push it for confirming your choices), Page Down and Page Up (for scrolling one page up/down, respectively), Fn (this is a functional key that you use with other keys for launching various applications) and a Windows security key (analogous to the Ctrl + Alt + Del combination). This designer solution seems to be most appropriate for the “tablet” aspect of the Acer TravelMate C111TCi. The system status indicators are placed along the screen frame, too, and the power, WLAN activity and Standby indicators have their duplicates on the external side of the lid.
The 10.4” screen supports 16-bit color and resolutions up to 1024x768. It is rather dark, even at the maximum settings. You set the screen parameters up using the functional keys. Visibility is poor at the lowest settings, although you can read something in full dark with comfort for your eyes.
You get two styluses with the Acer TravelMate C111TCi – one is full-size and another is portable (smaller). Both are non-contact, i.e. you don’t have to touch the screen surface. The back side of the electromagnetic “pen” can be used as an eraser (in programs that support this feature). The pen’s button serves for dragging and double-clicking. Yes, this “pen” is very functional:
The top panel has quick-launch buttons for starting applications you use often (you assign applications to two buttons by yourself; other buttons choose the WLAN connection interface, launch your e-mail client and Internet browser).
Our Acer C111TCi had only one speaker (but the manufacturer claimed there should have been two of them!) at the edge of the front panel.
The notebook keyboard looks somewhat like a full-size PC keyboard with the block of numerical keys, arrow keys, and twelve functional keys. In fact, it is easy-to-use and functional. The touchpad (a sensor panel that feels your touches on its surface) has an additional cursor scroll button and is a replacement for the ordinary mouse.
The front panel of the notebook contains only a port of the infrared module and an integrated microphone – both are designed in a metal insertion with the device model name specified.
The left side of the notebook has a button for locking the lid and a socket for the network cable.
The right panel of the Acer C111TCi is where you attach most of the peripherals: PC Card slot (PCMCIA), power on/off button, line-in and line-out jacks, two USB ports and one IEEE1394 port (these are protected with a rubber cover). The placement of the ports is not quite convenient: the devices have to lie on each other when you use them simultaneously (if the cable length is short as you can see by the example of the DVD/CD-RW drive and the floppy-drive, accompanying the notebook).
The back panel carries the Kensington lock, a replicator port, a phone cable (RJ-11) and network (RJ-45) connectors, and a monitor output.
The bottom panel has vent holes, a battery bay, a pocket for the personal card, a bracket for the bay with the system RAM and hard disk drive.
The Acer C111TCi is a Centrino platform with an Intel 855GME chipset, Pentium M 1GHz CPU (400MHz FSB) and Toshiba MK4025GAS HDD (4200rpm, 8MB cache buffer, 40GB capacity – good stuffing for a device of this class).
The manufacturer declares there are two DDR DIMM slots in the system filled with two 256MB PC2700 modules with an option of upgrade to 2GB. The slots are accessed through a bracket on the bottom panel. However, we didn’t find the second memory slot in the model we tested. The representative office of the manufacturer kept silent about this situation at the time when we were working on this review.
The integrated graphics subsystem supports Dynamic Video Memory Technology, thus the necessary amount of system RAM (from 8 to 64MB) is allocated dynamically for the needs of the graphics subsystem.
The audio subsystem provides good and loud sound, which is quite enough to listen to CDs and hear informational sounds from applications you run.
The optical drive you receive as an accessory to the Acer C111TCi can burn CD-R and CD-RW discs at 24x speed and can read DVD and CD discs at 8x and 24x speeds, respectively. Regrettably, it cannot be powered from batteries, so you can’t use it away from a power source.
The Acer C111TCi has an integrated power consumption system with ACPI support (Advanced Configuration and Power Interface). If the input devices (keyboard, mouse and so on) don’t show any sign of activity for a while, the system shuts them down to keep the maximum system performance, at the same time saving power.
The manufacturer intends this model for such application areas as medicine, press-conferencing, presentations, inspections, inventory checking and so on where frequent use of the accumulator batteries and wireless networking is necessary. That’s why the availability of Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connections is a big advantage of the Acer TravelMate C111TCi.
Before running our tests, we had Windows XP Tablet PC Edition (with DirectX 9.0) preinstalled. We also disabled network and power-saving services, turned off the audio subsystem and shut down antivirus software.
We ran our tests in two modes by changing the power consumption options. The first mode implies that the system is powered from the wall outlet; in the second mode the notebook worked from its own battery.
Benchmarks:
Our tests of the battery life time produced the following results:
The table suggests that the notebook can last on its own battery for a little more than two hours. That’s a poor result for a mobile computer that’s intended for “field environment”.
Synthetic tests and Business Winstone 2001 with Multimedia Content Creation Winstone 2002 tests serve to determine the computer performance in ordinary office and multimedia applications. The table below shows what the Acer C111TCi scored in these tests:
Our tests would be incomplete if we didn’t compare the results of the Acer with those of another notebook, ASUS S200N, which boasts similar configuration (see our article called ASUS S5200NE: a White Notebook Always on the Run). The major difference between Acer C111TCi and ASUS S200N is the chipsets they are based on (i855GM in the ASUS and i855GME in the Acer), different RAM frequencies (266MHz against 333MHz) and amounts of onboard memory (256MB against 512MB). The results are shown in the diagrams below.
SiSoftware Sandra gave out similar performance ratings for the processor and file system tests for the two notebooks (the numbers fitted in the measurement error range), while the memory performance differed because of the different memory frequencies.
As a result, the performance of Acer C111TCi in tests that emulate the work of the user in office and multimedia applications (Business Winstone 2001, Multimedia Content Creation Winstone 2002) is 5-10% higher. The advantage is evident.
The results of the gaming tests are quite predictable.
The use of a higher memory frequency leads to a higher performance of the graphics subsystem as the graphics tests confirm.
The results are good, considering that this device is truly “mobile”. The use of the ACPI-supporting power management system tells on the small performance hit when we shift from the wall outlet to the accumulator battery. Of course, you can’t run your favorite 3D shooter on this computer, but Acer TravelMate C111TCi is definitely not for hardcore gaming.
The Acer C111TCi computer is a successful mixture of a tablet and a notebook with best features of each device class. This digital assistant supports handwrite and voice input (you can work without the keyboard); it also becomes a substitute for the dictaphone and the reams of paper notes. Having a full-size keyboard, the device combines beautiful looks, small dimensions, good performance, excellent ergonomics and functionality. The use of English-language software may become a problem for some users, though (you may have to buy additional programs for working with non-Latin alphabets).
Overall, this notebook will suit those people who are working on the run. The excellent combination of price and performance add more appeal to this particular model.