What iF a Laptop Was Designed Right: The Acer TravelMate 8200
The iF awards aren’t like the happy family television award, or the teen’s choice of the minute award. No, the iF awards have been around for five decades, the whole time acting as a symbol of excellence in design, quality of construction, and trend-setting. When a company wins one of these International Forum awards, it deserves the right to toot its own horn. Enter Acer, tooting its horn. Their TravelMate 8200 and 5-Series LCD monitors took the 2006 iF awards for product design.
The TravelMate 8200 is an Acer notebook geared for the consumer market. It rides the wave of the latest mobile technology, with Intel Centrino Duo microprocessing power and hot GDDR3 memory. It is loaded with security options to keep the bad guys out, and a 1.3-megapixel Web camera to beam you to the good guys and gals in Cyberspace.
And while we’re talking design, one neat feature of the camera-it spins 225 degrees, without you having to actually rotate the whole notebook. The TravelMate even looks good, with a cool package built out of a carbon fiber (first used on the Ferrari series) that the aerospace industry has been keeping a secret-up until now-because of its resilience and low weight.
The Acer 5-Series monitors are fast and furious with an 8ms response time, so they make gamers happy no matter if they’re using the 17-, 19-, or 20-inch sized screen. And no matter how tall you are, no matter how stooped you sit, the 5-Series can be adjusted, via a torqued LCD hinge, into three comfortable-to-view positions.
The two Acer products beat out nearly 2,000 products from 37 countries around the world to top honors in the 2006 iF award competition. Judges considered each product’s design, ergonomics, materials, craftsmanship, and, for you tree huggers out there, friendliness to the environment. Needless to say, Acer kicked butt sufficiently enough in these categories to win out.
Related story:
– Travelmate 3000 wins Red Dot Award
By Matthew Brodsky – Laptopical
Wednesday, December 21, 2005