February 14th, 2008Review of Acer Aspire 4720
Review of the Acer Aspire 4520 which was an unadulterated Value for Money (VFM) solution. While the 4520 was an AMD-based laptop, the Aspire 4720 series that I am reviewing today is its Intel counterpart. Let’s see what distinction this notebook makes with an “Intel Inside” it… The Acer 4720 boasts of running on Intel’s new Santa Rosa platform, incorporating a new cohort of their chipset. Other than these, the Aspire 4720 also put together an Acer Crystal Eye webcam and the much-advertised Acer Empowerment Key (E-key).
Design and Features
Top: The Acer Aspire 4720 looks similar to the 4520 with black exteriors and all-white interiors. The black shiny top manner the ‘Acer’ logo in the centre is enclosed by a plastic surface. which is somewhat prone to fingerprints.
Bottom: The battery sits in the top corner. Below it is the RAM slot cover and a square grille in the centre to lay off the heat developed by the components.
Left corner: Many ports - VGA, S-video, IEEE 1394, Ethernet, Modem and 2 USB slots are placed here.
Next to them are the ExpressCard slot and the memory card reader.
Right Corner: The right side bears the DVD/CD writer, 2 more USB ports, and the adapter port.
The headphones/speaker, mic and line-in jacks are placed below the lid. Next to it is the volume roller. The roller is not very convenient to operate while ‘lapping’ this notebook.
Thankfully, the back portion does not have any connection ports. It’s generally inconvenient to access ports on the rear of a laptop every time you want to attach something.
The lid doesn’t have a mechanical locking system that’s traditionally found in the earlier generation laptops. Once the lid is opened, you can see the widescreen display with the webcam and the microphone located above it.
 
Below the screen we find keys for toggling WiFi and Bluetooth, as well as the shortcut keys for opening the default Web browser and mail client.
These are followed by a strip of the speaker grille.
A standard laptop-sized keyboard is placed below them
It’s followed by the touch pad. The touch pad has a 4-way mechanical scrolling button below it (unlike many others that feature a touch-based solution). Lastly, the Acer ‘E’ key sits on the top-right corner.
The overall build quality of Acer Aspire 4720 is good. I found the laptop to be marginally sturdier than the Aspire 4520 model. There was no creaking throughout the body.
Its weight is something that I was a little disappointed about. It weighs 2.45 kg, which is considered OK for a mainstream laptop. But the bulk and the overall design made it a little inconvenient to carry around in one hand. Too demanding, am I?
The screen is of good quality and portrays content pretty well. The webcam streams clear videos. The response time is good and it works well even in low lighting conditions.
The keyboard is quite smooth like any other laptop keyboard. I would rate the touch pad above average. I believe that the HP/Compaq touch pads are one of the best that I’ve come across. The 4-way scrolling button is not as convenient as the touch-based solution, but it’s got better accuracy.
The ‘E’ key is an instant access key to Acer’s set of utilities for their laptops which include a wireless network management interface, power management, one-touch recovery, drive-lock, and others. These tools have to be separately downloaded from Acer’s Website individually
The real world performance of this laptop was good. Windows Vista ran almost smoothly. The overall performance of the laptop was noticeably better than its AMD counterparts and the non-Santa Rosa Core2Duo CPUs running at similar clock speed, but it doesn’t match up to its elder brothers (the T7100 or better) in the Santa Rosa family. The not-too-demanding games like Unreal Tournament, COD, and Counter-strike etc. ran fine. But don’t expect to carry this laptop to your next gaming tournament. It’s just meant to serve normal boredom-killing 15 minute frag sessions and then getting back to work!
Battery
The Acer Aspire 4720 is powered by a 4000 mAh, 6-cell Lithium-ion battery pack. These specs are pretty standard for such a mainstream laptop. In my real world testing conditions, I place the laptop into full performance mode, with full brightness, and multi-tasked on it by using a word processor, listening to music, and surfing the Internet via WiFi. The battery meter went from a hundred to zero (percent) in 2 hours and 18 minutes. Thus, I can say that under the power saving mode, the Aspire 4720 should be able to deliver close to three hours of working time.
Hence, I conclude that the Acer Aspire 4720 has good battery life. It should very well last users to watch their favorite movie without worrying about a recharge.
Lastly, The Acer Aspire 4720 retails for a street price of Rs. 36,000 with a carry bag and one year international warranty (which will cover this laptop while you’re globe-trotting). For your information, now its AMD sibling (Aspire 4520) is retailing for a cool Rs. 29,500.
This laptop gives you an incremental performance boost (thanks to Intel’s Santa Rosa platform) for a premium of approximately 6500 bucks. Given the choice of hardware and the performance boost you get, this isn’t too hefty a premium to pay. The laptop is a good performer, packed with a good feature-set and is competitively priced as contrast to models from other brands.
