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As the dust settles on the Intel Centrino Duo launch, several machines based on the new technology have started to appear on the market. After the Acer TravelMate 8204WLMi our second Centrino Duo laptop comes from a UK company - not what you expect when you have massive players like Dell, IBM and HP on the case. The Voyager C550 is actually rather cunningly using an established Asus chassis and this is why Evesham has a product available so soon after the launch.

If you want all the technical details about the new platform I’d suggest you go and read the Acer review as it covers all the basics of what the new Centrino Duo platform has to offer. The Voyager C550 isn’t as highly specified as the Acer, but it also cost a lot less as a result. The processor is an Intel Core Duo T2400 clocked at 1.83GHz, which in itself isn’t bad. But the T2400 also represents the best value in the Core Duo range, offering great performance while costing considerably less than the 2GHz T2500 seen in the Acer.

With 1GB of DDR2 667MHz memory and a 100GB 7,200rpm SATA hard drive the base specs are very good indeed. Add to this an ATI Mobility Radeon X1600 graphics adapter with 256MB of memory and you get close to a desktop spec laptop. Besides the slower CPU and more modest memory complement, the Voyager C550 is so far quite similar to the Acer in terms of specification and it does of course use the same Intel PRO/Wireless 3945ABG 802.11a/b/g wireless card as this is part of the new Centrino standard. Bluetooth 2.0 is also part of the wireless specification.

The DVD writer is from LG and handles all types of writeable DVD media. It will write to DVD+/-R media at 8x, DVD+/-RW at 4x, DVD+/-R dual layer at 2.4x and finally DVD-RAM at 5x. In terms of design the Voyager C550 looks almost identical to the Asus A6Km-Q002H, which isn’t really a bad thing, but it’s definitely not as stylish as the carbon fibre finished Acer.

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