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Specs:
Acer travelmate 4500
1.5 Pentium M Dothan
15.4 WXGA LCD Display (1280x800)
ATI Mobility Radeon 9700, 64 MB DDR
512 MB 2700 ram (2x256mb)
Hitachi 60 GB SATA 100 disk 4200 rpm

I got my machine 3 days ago, no benchmarks here just pure impressions and facts. It’s my opinion and on top of that it’s my first laptop ever. So keep in mind I am a newbie on this area.

Design & Build
When I first saw this laptop at a local store I was happily surprised even though I had already seen screenshots of it online. The store ordered it home for my sake and I finally got to get some real life impressions of Acers new Folio design. The notebook is pretty sleek for a 15 inch model and weights approximately 3 kg. The design is nice and simple with nice and soft curves. Only the front panel seems to have these hyped futuristic forms, but it works pretty well, here the speakers and sound I/O’s as well as a single USB port together with power and status leds and 2 big wireless and Bluetooth status leds, which function as buttons to switch on or off their respectable functions, blend into one nicely designed front panel not killing the overall simplistic and business targeted design.
The chassis seems to flex a little emitting a small annoying squeaky sound when picking it up with one hand for instants, but the flexing doesn’t make the laptop seem less robust but more flexible. It emits no sounds when picked up with two hands when weight is distributed fairly across the laptop. And even though I haven’t had many laptops between my fingers, I’d categorize this laptop as a very good build quality. When tapping the chassis I get small vibrating sounds which I eventually identified as being the buttons on the Touchpad. They are a bit loose, but they don’t seem as if they will fall of anytime now.

Touchpad
I was actually accustomed to this touchpad in a relatively short period. The setup program for this touchpad allows for plenty of optimization and customization. I like playing little geeky wizard tapping or sliding my finger across the touchpad and happily enjoying the outcome of my actions. Quite innovative these touchpad’s are, but I presume it’s a standard for today’s laptops.
And as for the loose buttons, I prefer to tap the touchpad itself, that spares the buttons in my case.
It worked fine out of the package, but with some time customizing it can get better.

Screen
15.4 inch with a resolution of 1280 x 800 it yields a pretty nice work area. And things seem to be crisp and sharp. The screen is bright even on the dimmest settings. I am going to use this laptop for photo editing and designing and it’s my impression that quality is descent enough for such a purpose. I haven’t seen any screen look better with friend’s laptops, so even though I haven’t had many monitors in front of me compared to those which passed my eye, this one is one of the better ones. But guess it’ll still be some time for these screens to reach desktop standards.

Keyboard
It’s curved with ergonomics in mind. It works pretty well, don’t really feel the difference. Layout of they keys is very nice, especially happy to have the left ctrl button where it is supposed to be, letting the Fn button rest right beside it.
Keys are responsive, and I love the feel, prefer it from my desktop keyboard which is a laptop keyboard imitation by Logitech. The laptop is far more quite, but it’s not silent.

Battery life
I did 4½ hours of surfing and writing last night on a full charge, also watched some video for about 20 minutes. Haven’t done much Battery life testing, but I am satisfied with it so far. And if you really need portability buy another battery for the MultiBay.

Gaming
Currently I have only tested this laptop with Lineage 2. I played with low details playing it with the resolution 1024x786 in window mode spending most of the time in town where allot of characters are displayed simultaneously. And laptop did the job pretty well. But I am sure more ram and a 7200 rpm drive would work wonders.
Doing that upgrade myself at some point.

Conclusion
Currently very happy with this thing. One thing making this experience less super than intended, is that my girl bought a 12 inch asus laptop. It's sooo neet. But I wouldn't be able to produce nor game on such a laptop.
And the sony s 170 is just to expensive. Then again, I have always been a small gadget lover. And despite this, I enjoy my new "big" lappy very much.

Userfriendlyness
There are some additions I'd like to add which make this laptop even cooler. For instants, there is the acer launch utility. It makes the different buttons on the laptop work, and you can set it up to check a pop3 account ones in a while. When it does this, it does it in the background, and if you have mail, the email button will flash discreetly telling you that you have unchecked mails. Press the button and your default email program will popup downloading the mails.
Apart from this there are of course the default program launching shortcuts, and the wireless on and off button. Function shortcuts allowing for brightness and sound adjustment etc.


Low quality pictues, (Repost)