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The Acer TravelMate C312XMi is the latest tablet PC from Acer. At first this looks like a pretty ordinary notebook with a 14.1in display that offers a native resolution of 1,024 x 768, not that remarkable these days. However, a closer look at the screen hinge hints that this is much more than a normal notebook. It’s located in the middle of the base of screen and enables you to swing it around 180 degrees and lay it flat.

The processor is a Pentium M 740 clocked at 1.73GHz bundled together with 512MB of PC4200 DDR2 memory. One slight issue here is that the TravelMate C312XMi is only sold in this one configuration and if you’d want to upgrade your memory you will have to replace both memory modules. This is easy enough to do with one of them as it’s located at the bottom of the laptop. However, the second module is hidden underneath the keyboard and it’s not that easy to get to.

The TravelMate C312XMi is Centrino branded and as such uses an Intel chipset and wireless network card. In this particular model the chipset is the i915PM since it features a discrete graphics card. The Intel PRO/Wireless 2200BG wireless network card supports the 802.11b/g standards. Acer has also fitted Bluetooth to this specific model.

The graphics chip comes from nVidia and is the entry level GeForce Go 6200 with TurboCache. It has 32MB of local memory, which means that it doesn’t use up any of the system memory unless it’s doing 3D. It’s not really intended for games, but you could still run some games on it albeit at lower resolutions.

The hard drive is an 80GB 4,200rpm unit from Seagate, fairly slow compared to what you tend to get in notebooks these days, but at least it’s fairly spacious. The optical drive is from Toshiba and writes to DVD+/-R media at 8x, DVD+/-RW at 4x, DVD+R dual layer at 2.4x and finally DVD-RAM at 5x.

The optical drive is located on the front of the left hand side of the notebook and shares this side with the power switch and a Kensington lock hole. Most of the ports are located around the back. Here you’ll find the power connector, two USB 2.0 ports, S-Video out, a four-pin FireWire connector and a headphone and line-in jack. Hidden behind three small rubber flaps is the D-SUB connector, the modem and Ethernet sockets and a port replicator connection.

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