TravelMate P4: Underdog Acer's response to Lenovo's ThinkPad and the like in the business market

There are big and small players aplenty in the business laptop market. Readers thinking of a typical buisness laptop probably think of a Dell Pro, an HP EliteBook or a Lenovo ThinkPad. Perhaps even an Apple MacBook. On the other hand, an Acer laptop rarely springs to mind. Why?

First of all, Acer's presence in this crucial market is rather minor. While Acer's TravelMate laptops are indeed a well-known brand, acquired from Texas Instruments in 1997, other brands generate more money. Historically, Acer's rather dubious reputation regarding the quality of its laptops may have played a role here, but this is now a thing of the past.

One example of this is the Acer TravelMate P4 TMP414-42, which was recently the subject of a detailed review at Notebookcheck. In short, Acer hasn't really made any big mistakes here. This business laptop has great input devices, plenty of ports, robust-looking hinges, a bright, matte display and an efficient AMD processor. Both performance battery life are good. The laptop neither runs loudly nor overheats.

Aside from the coil whine, one piece of criticism of the TravelMate P4 is that it lacks certain business features such WWAN. Moreover, the design is a little outdated, but Acer isn't one of the major players and is unable to regularly bring new designs to market like its competitors.

Overall, we don't see any real reasons why the Acer TravelMate P4, which Acer offers for around $950, shouldn't be an option for many corporate customers – except perhaps for Acer's support, which we were unable to assess in our review.