Acer TravelMate P645 (2015) review

What Acer didn't provide in terms of sexiness, it certainly made up for in terms of connectivity. The P645 is one of the most port-heavy devices you'll find at this price point. And at just 3.31 pounds, that's a pretty impressive feat. Unfortunately, in an era when companies like Apple and Google are figuring out ways to do away with multiple ports, the P645 feels like a relic from a long forgotten time.

What it doesn't have is the storage capacity to rival the mobile workstations with which it's trying to compete. I suppose the increase in cloud adoption has made it acceptable to provide only 256GB of storage for an enterprise device, but it'll behoove anyone who deals with high resolution images to look for a device in the 1-2TB range.

Here is the Acer P645 configuration sent to TechRadar for review:

Spec sheet

• CPU: 2.2GHz Intel Core i5-5200U (dual-core)
• Graphics: Intel HD 5500
• RAM: 8GB (DDR3L SDRAM)
• Screen: 12.9-inch, 1,366 x 768 resolution
• Storage: 256GB Serial ATA/600 SSD
• Ports: 3 x USB 3.0 ports, VGA, RJ-45 ethernet, HDMI, Headphone jack, Microphone jack
• Connectivity: IEEE 802.11a/b/g/n/ac Gigabit Ethernet
• Camera: Built-in 720P Video Camera
• Weight: 3.1 pounds
• Size: 12.9 x 9.3 x 0.8 inches (W x D x H) (32 x 24 x 2 cm)

Features

The keyboard, trackpad and display are the holy trinity of laptop features (in this humble journalist's opinion). When you sit down at your laptop to work or play, you interact with those features more than any others. Unfortunately, the P645 fails in each of these three categories.

I've already discussed the putrid screen so I won't hammer that nail into the ground. The trackpad, which is equally abysmal, feels as if you're scrolling on ice. No, this isn't a symptom of high sensitivity calibration. No matter how much I toggle the tracking I feel like the pad isn't reading exactly what my fingers are trying to communicate.

Additionally, the left- and right-click buttons are utterly useless in this day and age. Anyone reading this has likely interacted with pads that let you left and right click on the pad itself, rather than requiring buttons to guide you on your journey. The buttons, which are thankfully the same height as the pad itself, are elegant enough to not provide too much of a physical distraction, but they are dreadfully ugly to look at.

The same goes for the fingerprint reader, which Acer has unthinkably placed at the center of the click buttons. Most manufacturers have wisely begun placing the reader at the right-hand-side of the keyboard, where it is out of your way once you're done scanning in. Acer has placed a feature you use only a few times a day at the very origin of your interactions with the P645.